If you have over-smoked a pipe...

I have experimented with the time I allow my pipes to rest for the last few months. Historically, I would only rest my pipes for 48 hours before I would allow myself to smoke the particular pipe again. However, I found that an even longer resting period resulted in a statistically significant number of better smokes. By better I mean dryer and more flavourful and with the tobacco burning down to the bottom of the bowl.
As a result, I now like to rest a pipe for a minimum of a week before I will smoke that pipe again. It works for me, but I am sure others are likely to have a different view and probably think that a week's rest is extreme.

Pipe rotation is a personal thing and in my opinion a function of many things. The factors that contribute to the pipe smoking well or not, on regular basis can be broken down into groups:

1. The pipe - some pipes, for whatever reason, take abuse better than others. Some may be smoked daily without any sourness, others like to rest.

2. The tobacco - the less additives in the tobacco, the greater the chance that it will burn evenly and to the bottom, without the dottle, leaving the pipe dry, with no moisture build up in the bottom. The other factor here is the tobacco moisture content - drier tobaccos will smoke better in terms of complete combustion, but may smoke faster and hotter. Tobaccos with higher moisture content may smoke slower, but will produce more condensation if not smoked properly.

3. The smoker - some of us like to make sure that we finish the tobacco by smoking to the bottom, others do not care about that. Also, some smokers are “wet” smokers, producing more saliva while smoking. The saliva then gets into the stem, adding moisture to the smoke channel.

4. The maintenance - the cleaner the pipe the drier the smoke. The most important part of the pipe to keep clean is the mortise hole - depending on the engineering of the pipe and how well the tennon fits and fills the mortise hole, there can be space for the smoke to condense, resulting in moisture flowing back down the draft hole.

5. The environment - depending on the geographical location, humidity may play a factor in how dry the smoke is going to be.
Some of those factors can be controlled by the smoker, some may not. As long as the pipe is well cleaned at the end of the day and given a chance to breathe overnight, it should deliver high quality smoke the next day and for many days after that…. . Just my opinion….

It really depends on how fastidious you are about cleaning. The mortise area in particular tends to build up a nasty combination of tobacco oils and pipe cleaner fuzz that can gradually degrade a pipe's smoking quality. If you're smoking a pipe multiple times per day, day in day out, you'll want to make a point to clean that area out at the end of the day because the pipe isn't getting much time to dry out naturally otherwise. For more lightly smoked pipes that are given more time to breathe, you might only need to do this once a month or so, maybe using some alcohol to help. As noted above, this depends on your tobacco choice and smoking style too, so there's no simple recommendation for everyone.
My experience suggests that extended heavy smoking without comparably careful cleaning can degrade a pipe beyond the ability of regular cleaning to correct. There was a space of a few years where I was smoking more than my collection could adequately handle. I had a dozen or so pipes, but 2-3 favorites were smoked at least once a day, and I wasn't being good about cleaning those out beyond a simple pipe cleaner through the stem after a smoke. I was also smoking them too hard and fast, which only produced more moisture to gum things up. I would occasionally give them an alcohol swabbing and pull a lot of goop out, but eventually found that even the alcohol cleaning didn't quite restore them to the old smoking quality I remembered. Now that I've bulked out the collection with another half-dozen quality smokers, I've gone back to those old pipes, carefully cleaned them out, reamed them down close to the wood, and done the salt-and-alcohol treatment on them. That's somewhat extreme, because it meant I basically had to break them in all over again, but now that I've done that they seem to be back to their old smoking glory.
Again, your smoking style, cleaning regimen, and tobacco choice all play into this. But for a pipe smoked that hard, you might consider the salt-and-alcohol treatment for it. As you suggest, I think it's easy for the pipe's taste to change so gradually that you don't notice it happening.

I smoked 3 different cobs every day all day long using the same aromatic and one of them was over 13 y/o when I dropped it and it had been run over before I could retrieve it and it never was sour but did build a cake which I kept trimmed. Cleaning your pipe allows the nasties to adhere to the pipe cleaner where they can be discarded leaving your pipe ready to breathe awaiting to please you with another great smoke. If the way you take care of it pleases the smoke you get from it then you are fine.

banjo

I don't think so, if you keep it clean and it's dry enough.
If it doesn't gurgle it's probably fine. Clean the shank and trim the cake and you're good to go, as far as I'm concerned.

Sometimes I just ponder and wonder if this whole rotation thing and having multiple pipes so they can relax and recuperate between smokings was just some conspeerissy started by the pipe companies to get you to buy more pipes. Just something to ponder and wonder about over the next couple of bowls.

Click to expand...

Any excuse for a decent bout of the PAD!

I try not to smoke one bowl after another in the same pipe, but often I get in a rut and smoke the same pipe everyday for a week or two. Ser Jacopo is a quality engineered, quality material pipe, it will hold up better than lesser pipes. I have an Ashton that got the multiple times a day treatment, and it is still my best pipe, but now I purposely leave a week between smokes to make sure it stays king of the hill....or rack.
As to the "Back in the good old days, guys only had one pipe" line of thought. This is true, but they also had no problem smoking bowl after bowl, never cleaning (and sometimes never emptying it), and letting the cake go till it split the bowl, chucking it and grabbing another. Most were buying from a news-stand or drug store, and didn't even know what kind they had (I asked one old piper what kind he smoked and he said "Wooden. All pipes come from the same factory, Kaywoodie"), and darn sure didn't spend (adjusted for the times) what we do. Back in "the olden days" the pipe was a more perishable item.

Other than cleaning it after every smoke, I don't think there's any harm in smoking the pipe that much. Why not proceed as you so choose, an issue develops, address it; if not, keep going? I don't believe you're doing the pipe any lasting harm such that drying it out for as long as need be wouldn't correct.
We are said to rotate pipes so that they have a chance to dry out. I was much more observant of this when I started, more liberal now. I eyeball the chamber if I have concerns about the pipe needing rest. You'll get an idea of what different grades of wetness leave the corresponding darkness at the bottom of the bowl. When the pipe has dried out sufficiently, it is lighter.
But that's if I'm checking. I'd say that if I've smoked a pipe a half-dozen times over the course of a couple days, I give it two or three days rest. But as the subtleties of taste do not impact my sensibilities, other than gurgle, I don't think I would know if I was smoking a pipe too much. What does wetness taste like? And I can't see that a pipe insufficiently dry will gurgle any more than one that was rested. I rarely get gurgle.

Twenty-three years ago at the age of seventeen I picked up my first pipe, btw, still smokes great, and began a habit of three bowls a day. After a smoke I would clean it up with pipe cleaners and let it fully cool off. Now at age forty and having much higher quality pipes, Weaver, Jeppenson, etc. I have a larger rotation but still do the same three bowls throughout the day. I do clean all of my pipes yearly with the salt and alcohol treatment and have yet to have a pipe sour. I do advise only using bristle type pipe cleaners though. They seem to get more of the gunk out.