Synergy
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G. L. Pease - Mar 15, 2022
- 4 min read
It started out like any other day, then the world changed. I woke up, made my morning espresso, waited for the fog to clear, and set about my affairs. Part of my morning routine usually involves a pipe, of course, so I trundled into the office, chose a pipe, and grabbed the tin of tobacco I’d been enjoying for the past few days. I’m not normally a creature of habit when it comes to what I fill my pipe with, but for some reason, I’ve found myself exploring this blend exclusively since popping its top. I filled my pipe with the same haphazard disregard I always employ, sat down to check the morning’s email, and struck a light.
This tobacco has been consistently great, just as it has been when I’ve smoked it in the past. I don’t tend to smoke blends that don’t make me happy, so there’s nothing unusual in that. As I took the first puffs, everything was as expected. Rich flavors from the Virginia leaf took center stage, the Latakia, orientals and Perique playing harmoniously on my palate, doing the same joyous dance I’ve come to expect from this blend.
A gentle tamp of the ash dome, another kiss of flame, and BOOM, a Spinal Tap moment, like someone had just turned the amplifiers to eleven. It wasn’t sweeter, or cooler, or brighter, or more complex, or more of any of the usual descriptors we might apply to a great smoke; it was just more. It was huge. It was delicious. I was tasting things from the tobacco that I’d never fully noticed before, so much so that I put the morning tasks on hold so I could just sit and do nothing but enjoy the incredible experience.
My friend Fred Hanna has written about the Magic Pipe that is so good it makes every tobacco taste great. This ain’t that. The pipe is a rather modest sandblast billiard that I’ve smoked many times. It’s well broken-in, has always been a fine smoker, and I expected nothing more or less from it this time. Predictable and reliable.
Too, I’ve occasionally posited, in jest, that there are Magic Tobaccos that taste great in any pipe, no matter the pedigree. This ain’t that, either. This tobacco is not some rare, vintage blend with decades of age under its unobtainium cap. It’s just a solid performer that, while being somewhat sensitive to technique and to a lesser extent the geometry and flow characteristics of the pipe, has always been, like the pipe, predictable and reliable.
This was different, though. The synergy between this tobacco and this pipe cast some sort of spell that could not be ignored. There are things that might help to explain this phenomenon. Most notably, perhaps, is that every time we smoke a pipe, the results sit on the shoulders of every previous smoke.
Objectively, today’s smoke will always be influenced by yesterday’s tobaccos. All tobaccos leave their spirits behind to haunt future bowls. How dramatically these phantasms haunt the current smoke depends on many factors, but one of the most significant influences is how different the style of the current tobacco is from the lingering ghosts of tobaccos past. I’ve had really interesting results when switching a dedicated Latakia pipe over to Virginias. The decreasing, subtle contribution of the Latakia’s smoky tastes can make the first few bowls more complex, and definitely interesting. Conversely, I’ve often used several bowls of Virginias to “sweeten” one of my Latakia pipes that has gone a bit flat. (Try it. You might like it.) To paraphrase Heraclitus, no one ever smokes the same pipe twice.
More subjectively, though, our expectations can play a role when we choose a pipe. We subconsciously remember the last few times we’ve smoked it, and can enter the experience with a bit of bias, a sort of sensory anchoring heuristic. My old friend Duke used to say, “If you think it will smoke well, it will.” There might well be some nugget of truth in his optimistic aphorism.
I remember one evening at a pipe dinner, I smoked a bowl of very well aged Drucquer Red Lion in a beautiful Barling Quaint belonging to my friend Brian. I could not talk him out of the pipe, no matter what I offered up in trade. I shared the tobacco with him, he granted me the booby prize of letting me smoke his Barling. It was thirty years ago, but the memory is as fresh in my mind as if it was yesterday. Duke’s Law at work? I’ll never know for sure, but the smoke was transcendent, and certainly memorable.
So, always seeking increased understanding, I waited a couple days, lathered, rinsed and repeated, tailoring my rather tatty, moth-eaten cloak of objectivity as best I could to make it fit, but still hoping for the same experience, even while half-expecting a more typical result.
And, there it was. Amps on eleven. Smoking bliss writ large. I haven’t had the nerve to try it again, fearing that these two data points, while certainly establishing a line, may still be anomalous. Even my dedication to inquiry has its limits, and the fear of disappointment looms in the fragrant clouds of yesterday’s exquisite smoke.
What remains is to decide whether to further the experiment, and possibly dedicate this pipe to one blend, and one blend only, or to just cherish this matched pair of memories, as I do the reminiscence of Brian’s Barling, carrying on along the Magical Mystery Tour of pipe smoking while chasing the next occurrence of synergy, silently hoping that it doesn’t take another thirty years. Meanwhile, the pipe patiently rests…
Photos by G.L. Pease
Written by G. L. Pease
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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. 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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.
Great Article! I’ve enjoy many blissful bowls of Vintage GLP Abingdon and Drucquer’s 805 over the years. I’ve seen some of Brian’s Quaint’s, they are truly amazing pieces!