This Guy is Definitely a “Pipe Guy”
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 628! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with pipe maker J. Mouton. Jason was born, raised, and currently resides in Gueydan, Louisiana. He started smoking cigars and then pipes. He is a carpenter and wood turner that likes to make duck calls. This led to making tampers, and that naturally led to making pipes. He makes both classic and freehand shapes. At the top of the show will continue the virtual tour of Brian’s pipe collection. He will discuss three meerschaum pipes that are special to him for different reasons.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 627. Our featured interview tonight is with Aaron from Tobacco Pipe Diary on Instagram. Aaron is a 29-year old pipe smoker from Spokane, WA. His interview is part of our ongoing series of pipe smokers that are under the age of 30. He comes from a family of Japanese tea growers, and his aunt smokes a pipe, but that is not what got him started. He actually started with cigars, and then decided to smoke cigars while practicing the Japanese martial art of Kendo, which is a type of fencing that originated as a samurai warriors’ customary swordsmanship exercises. Eventually he started smoking pipes and he also sells restored estate pipes. 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.
Something has been rattling around in my noggin for years, the result of many late night conversations with a lot of folks in a lot of fields, like chefs, winemakers, coffee roasters, and especially other dedicated pipe enthusiasts. It seems like we’ve all got stories about how our palates have developed over time and with continued experience. For many of us, it’s not just that our tastes have changed through the years, but our perceived ability to taste has also evolved. While often this results in a deeper appreciation of our favored blends or styles of tobacco, other times it can result in a complete change in our preferences; we may find ourselves not liking something we’ve previously enjoyed, or craving things we never thought we liked. When I was fairly new to the pipe, I didn’t have much interest beyond fairly rich Latakia mixtures. I’d tried many different “aromatics,” and none of them did much for me. Though I could appreciate the way they smelled in the jar or in the room, their taste rarely delivered what their aromas promised. Similarly, I didn’t find much pleasure in Virginia blends, their flavors being more muted and too subtle to hold my interest. Even when I did smoke them, I’d nearly always follow up with a bowl of the smoky stuff to scratch that familiar itch. I tended to gravitate towards those bold, assertive flavors largely because my palate hadn’t yet developed a full appreciation of the nuances of subtler tobaccos. Plus, I just loved the way they smelled. Many have shared similar stories about their own early steps along the journey, though for some it’s been sort of the opposite; Latakia was too overwhelming to their taster, and they started out preferring more gentle fare. In retrospect, this makes sense to me. Being a bit hyperosmic, I craved tobaccos that provided a taste experience that lived up to the expectations established by their intense aromas. Things are rather different for me now. Though I still crave my long beloved, rich, heavy Latakia mixtures, I’ve learned to deeply appreciate and enjoy a much broader range of tobacco styles. What changed? In honesty, a lot of this is just the natural result of doing what I’ve been doing for a living over the last 25 years. Spending so much time focused acutely on tobacco cannot help but change one’s relationship to it. Concentrating on the minute differences between two batches of some variety, or how a tiny change in the percentage of one leaf over another can influence a blend makes my brain jump through different hoops now than it did when I started out. It’s the same for any of us who zoom our attention in on what we do. We all start out with pretty much the same basic sensory apparatus, but as we concentrate on what we’re tasting, over time our brains adapt to have both greater resolution, and to more quickly identify less obvious nuances. Think of it as building a sort of multi-dimensional network of neural connections, each of our experiences forming a set of individual nodes. The more attention we pay to those experiences, the more complex and densely interconnected the network becomes. We gradually become better able to associate different aspects of the subtle sensory inputs with one another, and the richer the experience becomes. Some of this happens naturally, of course, but the more consciously we focus, the faster we “learn” to appreciate novel subtleties, and the quicker these connections are traversed, allowing us to more easily distinguish one taste from another. That’s pretty much what’s happened inside my own gulliver over the last 25 years of blending, and the process continues to this day. I’m often asked how one can learn to identify and even put a name to all the flavors that different leaf and different blends can present. My advice has always been the same: Focus and take notes. Read reviews to see what others detect, and try to pick those flavors or aromas out. Your experience might be completely different, but their impressions can still be useful. The more information we have, and the more attention we put on our own experience, the more we’ll begin suss out those elusive tastes. To some, this seems like too much effort, too much like work, and that’s a fair cop. As I said, some of this just happens naturally, and there’s nothing at all wrong with just enjoying the natural evolution of our palates over time. But others may want to accelerate this process, or take it to a deeper level, and that’s where the note taking comes into play. By thinking about what we’re smoking, engaging our analytical machinery and putting our sensorial experiences into words, our attention gradually shifts to the more subtle notes we perceive, associating them in their sensory proximity to past experiences, even those unrelated to tobacco, In doing so, we build our own network in a more conscious fashion, and soon begin detecting things we’d never noticed before as our sensory landscape takes on more dimension, adding another aspect to the pleasures of the pipe. The pipe can be a pleasant distraction from a world which is too often complex and over-stimulating. But, as an almost meditative practice, puffing in a more mindful way, focusing attention on the array of pleasures that our seemingly simple pastime offers, keeping a few simple notes, we can take our enjoyment to another level. I certainly recommend it, at least occasionally, but only if you find it fun.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 626. Our featured interview tonight is with Chris Mattioda of C. Martin Pipes. Chris is a 25-year old part time pipemaker from Enumclaw, Washington. He actually made a pipe before he smoked one as it was one of his chosen 9th grade wood shop projects. Later he acquired a wood lathe and was making pens and other items, but he became real serious about making pipes when he came across a video of pipemaker Jeff Gracik. At the top of the show Brian will follow up on a two year old tobacco review on Savinelli Janus. He let the tin age for two years and now he will explore the differences.
This is the time of year I like to refer to as the “in-betweens.” It’s not fall, and summer is taking an occasional breather. Just like some of us who begin to search for new tobacco blends as well as hauling out an old dependable. Deep breaths. It is basically a three-pipe problem! What got me all in a twist thinking about change is a recent post from Maxim Engle, whose website Pipes2Smoke about his preferences for this time of year. Of course, his season in Ontario, Canada, is a bit different than here in Southern environs. Maxim, from whom I have purchased many a pipe over the years, says he “shifts to slightly heavier tobaccos with more pronounced Latakia. “The flakes get heavier.” Maxim has provided me with some of the most remarkable pipes in the Pundit herd, including Ian Walker’s stupendous Northern Briars from England, crafted in that Old English way. A few Commonweal trophies from the master pipe makers Les Wood, and Michael Parks, and stems by Charles Lemon have come to me via Maxim. Only a handful of these are made each year to continue a tradition Maxim began in 2021. Les Wood and Ferndown are synonymous with other Old English lovers. And let’s not shrug off Pundit’s love for meerschaum, the ancient beauties from the oceans’ bottomless dark where ancient seashells were crushed and made into properties that only pipe makers could bring to life. Many, many of those gorgeously carved pipes grace the Pundit herd of honor. Now that we have the pipe show and tell over, let’s return to Maxim’s tobacco maxims. Well, if you are a tobacco wimp like Moi, who does not fondly recall a dose of the heaves produced by a brief encounter with a blend that will go unnamed. Hard-core blends are better left to others. I know, you tough guys begin looking for a pipe when the description of the blend includes dark-fired Tanzanian leaf and steamed and pressed Virginias. And other things called ropes and bogies! So, with that, let’s move on. Pundit is very meticulous when it comes to going big blend bazookas as the weather begins to change. I tend to stick to lighter Virginias and English blends, such as Presbyterian, or a bit stronger on the heavier scale, Cornell & Diehl’s Epiphany, a blend of Virginias, Burleys, Latakia, and Perique. I take this in a special sip and put-down pipe and think of Mr. E equals MC2, Albert Einstein. His smoke was Revelation, which C&D has produced in a most relevant version. And with our tobacco lessons out of the way today, let’s move on to more prominent issues. You must know by now that Peterson Pipes and SmokingPipes.com have announced the Peterson Pipe of the Year for 2024. These are always a must-buy for Pundit. Once again, SPC’s Chuck Stanion has written a marvelous retrospection of Peterson’s POYs over the more than two decades the legendary manufacturer has turned them out. If you want to know more about Peterson’s POY’s recent arrival on the SPC website, check out Chuck’s August Pipe Line for his fabulous Peterson’s Pipe of the Year: A Retrospection. Now a look at Pipe Smokers of the Past: Some legendary authors grace the September list of PSOP. Three of the authors for September won the Nobel Prize for Literature: William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and William Golding, of British heritage. Let’s begin with William Cuthbert Faulkner, a Southern author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. He was born on Sept. 25, 1897, in New Albany, Miss., and died July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Miss. No man is himself, he is the sum of his past—William Faulkner. Sir William Gerald Golding, Nobel Laureate (1983) a British, novelist, poet, and playwright, was born on Sept. 19, 1911, in Newquay, United Kingdom, and died on June 19, 1993, at Tullimaar House, Perranarworthal, Cornwall, United Kingdom. We need more humanity, more care, more love—From 1983 Nobel lecture. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on Sept. 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Mo., and died on Jan. 4, 1965, in London, United Kingdom. T.S. Eliot moved to England in 1914 and became a British citizen in 1927. He renounced his American citizenship and lived in England. Author of one of the most influential literary works, The Waste Land, in 1922, was instrumental in winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot is considered one of the most consequential poets of the 20th century. Although a search of history records that report Eliot was a heavy smoker, finding his favorite pipe tobacco blend or cigar preferences has not turned up much in the way of facts. The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man—T.S. Eliot And now a Parting shot from Pundit: I had a three-pipe problem not too long ago. I took masterful advice from fictional detective Sherlock Holmes who said he needed time for quiet, a time to work on the problem alone. He did and it took him less than an hour to solve his case in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Red-Headed League. It took me a bit longer than an hour, but the Sherlockian three-pipe method worked. You might give it a try the next time you have a difficult curve ball. Three pipes will be all you need.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 625. Our featured interview tonight is with Eric DeVito. Eric is a 26-year old pipe smoker from Chicago, recently moved to Arizona. His interview is part of our ongoing series of pipe smokers that are under the age of 30. He’s been smoking a pipe for 8 years. Pipes have always appealed to him since he was 5-years old when he went with his dad to visit his Uncle Al. The two men smoked cigars on this visit, but he saw his uncle’s pipe rack and never forgot about it. He brought his intrigue to fruition when he was 18 years old and started smoking pipes. At the top of the show, we’ll have an “Ask the Pipemaker” segment with pipe artisan Jeff Gracik, and this time the question comes from Brian.
