The Corner of Maple Street & Memory Lane
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Kevin Godbee - Dec 2, 2013
- 6 min read
E. Roberts
How many of us can remember the exact moment of our first meeting with what is now an old friend? I can say with confidence that I remember hundreds of them. I have them charted and spreadsheeted, many of them even with accompanying photographs, and I keep track of them all in my trusty notebooks. By now you may have a worried look on your face and fingers on your phone’s 9 and 1 buttons…but fear not, gentle reader. No, I’m not a celebrity stalker; I’m merely a tobacco enthusiast, and this is my story.
One of the most enjoyable facets of our hobby is its appeal to ritual. Pipe smoking is not a quick-fix like cigarettes or fast food; we must prepare ourselves for the task: selecting just the right combination of pipe and leaf for our mood, perhaps shaving some slices off a plug or rubbing out a few choice flakes, taking care to fill the bowl according to the leaf’s demands, singeing the top first to temper it to the flame, allowing it to acclimate a few moments before returning with the true light, and then settling back in for an hour’s enjoyment in puffing away and paying close attention to the maintenance of the ember. It is the perfect pastime for those of persnickety disposition, and keeping a journal of one’s exploits and discoveries is entirely in keeping with the focus and adoration we tend to bestow upon the briar and the leaf.
It was on the evening of March 9th, 2011, that I popped open my first tin of Sutliff Private Stock’s Maple Street. I smoked it in my favorite Medico bulldog, a pipe I sadly no longer own—it met a grisly demise, as I recall, shattering on the pavement while I was out for a walk later that spring. I noted, “a really lovely rum & maple smell…crumbly ribbon cut…color a dark amber—like maple syrup.” According to the notes, it bit my tongue a little, but more because of the heat than the leaf. Closing my eyes, I can see my slightly younger self enjoying that first bowl, diligently taking notes, not knowing then they would be referenced in this future article (and not caring that I should write more legibly, even if only for myself). Over the course of that March, I experimented with drying times and pipes to smoke it in. There, on the 15th I over-dried it, and didn’t enjoy the smoke much. By the 30th I realized that a large part of the problem was my cadence—I just kept smoking the stuff too darn fast, and in too small a bowl. April 16th marked my eureka moment with it. Loading it in my Peterson 106 Christmas billiard, a doughty group 4 reserved for aromatics, I see it was, “like candy on the tongue tonight. Pancakes, sweet maple and tea. Burns great all the way through.”
Like all tobacco relationships, it was ephemeral—I moved on to other blends after that tin was finished. Flipping the pages in the journal, it appears that this was my Summer of Love for VaPers, zipping through and cataloguing my take on more than two dozen different brands of the stuff. Sure as death and taxes, though, autumn rolled around and my instinctive need for comfort foods and sugary calories found me craving something sweet to smoke as well. Maple Street’s tin art, a swatch of a golden yellow maple leaf emblazoned across the front, called to me from the shelf as being the perfect tobacco to satisfy. My purchase of 12th September lasted exactly twenty-two days, unfortunately with sparse notes to remind me of our time together. “Good flavor & burn, not as sweet as previous tin. Burley coming through (maybe because of ghosts).” Fitting that ghosts are mentioned in October.
I left Maple Street for other smokes again, this time not picking up a tin until the following autumn. What had happened? Did we have a lover’s spat, vowing to go our separate ways, only to return as the leaves started to fall? Had she burned me again, and had I forgotten to record the incident? At any rate, here I was in October 2012, stocking my cellar with three more tins. The first tin was opened immediately after purchase, and lasted a mere 6 days. The only note I made of this apparently passionate reunion was that of a “great consistency…nice nutty burley to balance the sugar maple sweetness. Great morning smoke with Coke.” Did I read that correctly? Why in blazes was I drinking Coca-Cola for breakfast? By all appearances this was a rather ardent bout of piping, so perhaps it’s better to stick with the facts of the matter. A second tin was devoured at the beginning of December, lasting a full eight days at least. I can see I was enjoying a full range of blends at this time, a lot of aromatics and some crossover Latakia styles. Notes here indicate that I’m pleased with its sweetness, and its ability to mix in with other non-aromatic blends.
Like clockwork again this year, as September drew to a close, I opened another tin of Maple Street. My neighbors were out of town, and I was given to taking their dog for long walks with a pipeful guaranteed to grant me some smiles from the passersby. Remembering that it was on my review schedule, I was obliged to open another tin on the 20th of November, though I’m sure I’d have opened another at some point regardless of schedule; that tin only lasted a weekend, so here I am with another tin opened to finalize my article notes.
So, to recap: over the course of two and a half years I’ve consumed seven tins of Maple Street, which last an average of two weeks from beginning to end. Charting my usage pattern over the course of these seven tins (well, really eight, since I’m smoking my way through one right now), I can see it’s one of my favorite fall time blends, mainly enjoyed between September and early December. My notes concur over time that the blend has a solid sweet maple taste that matches its aroma without being cloying or overly treated. It burns well, with the proviso that I have a tendency to smoke it a little too quickly as I chase the flavors, and tastes best to me in a largish chamber like that Peterson billiard. I caution myself in my notes against mouth fatigue from smoking too much and too often, and tend to ignore it every year. Did I need a spreadsheet and notebooks to tell me all of this? Of course not. But like photographs, these notes of mine are snapshots into my own development as a pipe smoker, my own enjoyment of my cellar, and a living history of my tastes. With many of the entries I can recall precisely the day they’re describing; even the most mundane smoke, preserved in a journal, becomes a significant milestone on this journey of discovery. Extensive note keeping like mine isn’t for everybody, but for me it paints in all the details in this picture with improved clarity. It tells me more than just what I like or dislike, it tells me exactly how and why and when, and on occasion takes me for a nice walk down memory lane.
I should have been a doctor with that handwriting!
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Written by Kevin Godbee
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! 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A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Though I haven’t touched an aro in more than a year, your essay makes me want to try one again.
Now, which pipe shall I sacrifice? LOL
Bill is the only person I know who can describe an aromatic and make me want to try it.
Bill — that tin list printout. What’s it from?
@Allan–that’s an easy one–go out and get yourself some Missouri Meerschaum corncobs!
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@KC–one of these days I’ll get you to smoke an aro….
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@Planetary–that’s actually a printout from tobaccocellar.com. I’ve not been as diligent as I should with keeping track of my cellar lately, that’s my next project.
When I drank artisan beer I kept a log of tasting notes in order to know what I liked and why, and the purpose was to be able to know what I should buy again. I can’t remember this of being much benefit for the avowed reason, but it did develop my beer vocabulary. I’ve never kept a pipe tobacco log, and given that I’ve been smoking for 14 years, I’ve forgotten my reaction to a significant number of blends. Does that motivate me to start a tobacco log? Not yet:).
Well, get on it Mike!