Top Ten Tricks and Treats for the Autumn Piper
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Kevin Godbee - Oct 27, 2014
- 6 min read
E. Roberts
Here in the Northeast, autumn has most definitely arrived: leaves are rustling underfoot, there’s a chill in the air, and sweaters and scarves are the order of the day. There’s no staving off the season, so one may as well give oneself over to it and enjoy. I’m drinking my tea hot now, rather than iced, and my taste in tobaccos is veering toward the spicier blends, be they Lat bombs or Perique powerhouses. With the changing of the leaves, let’s take a look at some fall leisure activities that are perfect for maximizing your own piping pleasure.
Ephemeral art of the season from Villafane Studios.
Release your inner artist with some pumpkin carving! Pumpkin carving has probably been around since man first had free time to play with his food, but in the last several years it has risen to the level of high art. There’s an undeniable satisfaction in getting your hands dirty with this subtractive sculpting process, a Zen like appreciation for art that is destined to be short-lived (a carved pumpkin will only last a week or so), and a suitably contemplative pastime to enjoy with a pipe.
Pro tip: this can be a messy activity, so it’s the perfect time for a corncob pipe that you won’t mind getting dirty.
Who can resist a brilliant food pun?
Enjoy the harvest of seasonal foods. Cooking some comfort food at home is a splendid cool-weather activity, and an ideal time to add a new recipe to your arsenal. A trip to the local farmer’s market makes for a fun excursion and will key you in to the freshest produce. It’s a great medium in which to indulge your creative side, and what better way to prepare for a postprandial smoke than by making a wonderful meal? On my own to-cook list are bourbon apple pie, butternut squash soup, maple mousse and bacon-wrapped dates.
Pro tip: awesome autumn-tini recipe!
- 1½ oz pear vodka
- 1½ oz peach schnapps
- 1½ oz apple cider
- 1½ oz ginger ale
- apple slice for garnish
Gussied up or not, a walk in the woods with a pipe is sublime.
Take a walk in the woods. This may seem a no-brainer for those readers in rural areas, but for us urban denizens, Mother Nature is often something experienced vicariously. The changing color of leaves, the brisk air, and the palpable sense of decay and renewal are things that speak to our deeper nature, and cool weather heightens the enjoyment of many a blend. A recent rowboat excursion in Central Park was made all the more enjoyable with my pipe and a Lat bomb unsuitable to be smoked near civilians, and a day trip upstate to the Storm King Art Center made for some refreshing en plein air sculpture appreciation, while the aromatic I was smoking sparked a brilliant conversation with some Dutch tourists.
Pro tip: make sure that your walk in the woods is a safe one—be careful with matches and embers. Only you can prevent wildfires.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with watching 75 consecutive episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Nothing.
Binge-watch your favorite series—all seven seasons in a row! Outdoor activities are well and good, but I’m not above vegetating mindlessly indoors, snug in a blanket as the temperature drops, either. Fall is the start of a new season for your favorite serials, so naturally it’s the best time to lock yourself in the living room for a weekend watching marathon. Just make sure you leave word with friends and relatives to come rescue you if you don’t show up for work on Monday.
Pro tip: lubricating eye drops are your friend for extended viewings.
My fall classics reading list.
If the boob tube isn’t your cup of tea, then catch up on reading the classics. Reading and piping go together like peanut butter and jelly. We pipe enthusiasts tend to be a well-read lot, I’d guess well above the national average, and that’s surely something to be proud of. Delving into a novel needn’t be a solitary expedition, either—reading aloud with friends or family can be a fun bonding experience, sharpening your oratory skills and really involving you in the story.
Pro tip: let go of your inhibitions and try out different voices for characters when reading with a partner or family—bring the page to life!
J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS!
Are you ready for some football? Not that silly game the rest of the world confuses with "soccer", but real, true, honest to goodness American Football. Fall Sundays mean barbeques, brews and buddies and, above all, enjoying a pipe or three. While smoking at the stadiums is verboten, tailgate parties and Sunday socials at the tobacconist are some of my favorite venues to enjoy a game while having a bowl (or a cigar).
Pro tip: wear natural fibers. They don’t burn as easily as synthetics when you dump a bowlful of embers on yourself while yelling at the ruling on the field.
Don’t let your pipes get this dirty.
Time to take care of your pipes. While not limited to the season, I’ve personally fallen into the habit (see what I did there?) of performing the full maintenance routine on my collection, which now numbers in the hundreds, when the weather turns. While I tend to be a bit persnickety about keeping my pipes tidy on a day-to-day basis—cleansing the airway and bowl after every use, and a quick alcohol swab after several uses—there comes a time when it’s prudent to take the whole lot and give them a thorough once-over, and fall means I have the time and inclination for the task. Thorough cleaning involves reaming the cake back to a millimeter or less, a thorough airway cleansing, possibly an alcohol retort, removing any tar around the rim, attending to any stem discoloration, brightening up any ailing stampings, and a good wax and polish. And yes, I even clean my cobs!
Pro tip: I use a 60/40 mix of rectified spirits and brandy, with a couple drops of honey dissolved in it, as pipe cleaner & sweetener, and pure lemon juice to remove tar from the rim.
Bonfire photo from Arno’s Dutch Pipe Smoker blog.
Build yourself a bonfire and have some friends over. Perhaps Ayn Rand said it best in Atlas Shrugged: "I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips." Fire speaks to us in our most deeply rooted collective unconscious; a hypnotic entity, provider of comfort, and, paradoxically, a voracious destroyer. With every pipe we enjoy, we are harnessing one of the elements, and I am convinced that consciously or not, this is one of pipe smoking’s great appeals. Likewise, a bonfire in the cold weather, and friends to share it with, conjures up a peculiarly human experience. Combine the two for autumn magic.
Pro tip: again, safety first (and bring on the s’mores!).
Freaks come out at night …
Go see a parade—or be in one! Halloween and Thanksgiving mean parades here in the States, and going to spectate or even participate is a great activity to bring your pipe along to enjoy. As pipe smokers, we’re all halfway into our Sherlock Holmes costumes already!
"As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible
and is therefore full of deep significance." -Calvin and Hobbes
Carve yourself a pipe. Yes, I’m pulling a classic bookend maneuver for this article, but it’s completely fitting, not to mention being on my real-life to-do list for this fall. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for years now, and this is the time. Knowing that the real point of the exercise is simply to stretch my creative muscles, and possibly end up with a serviceable tool in the end, makes it less daunting. There is no failure except not trying, after all. If any adventurous readers heed the call, please post pics of your efforts in the forum page!
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 […]
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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! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. 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.
What a fun article!
Well once I have the pipe, pie, martini and football it’s going to be awfully hard to work up the gumption to do the other things. But I like the idea! Any suggestions on a good tobacco pairing with that cocktail?
Very nice spirit to this article.:)
Ha, love the Data reference.
Great article Bill – as always. Enjoy your Autumn! LOL.
Thanks for yet another in a growing string of well written and nicely illustrated articles. Autumn is one of my favorite seasons, and I think a big part of that is the special enjoyment my pipe brings. It is a time of results, and settlements, and rewards for the year’s labors. Your observation that the pipe harnesses an element of Nature resonates with me particularly well.
Absolutely fantastic report Bill. You actually make the fall season a lot more pleasant than I usually experience!! LOL
I’ve just finished raking leaves, bundling up the house, putting away all the items on the outside decks and preparing for the winter doldrums. Oh, yea, we did have 6 inches of snow yesterday (Nov. 3). Time to take your suggestions to heart and enjoy the season a bit more. Thanks again for a super article, your column put enjoyment to a new perspective.
@ reniaeats : Pairing suggestion for the Autumn-tini? Hmm…Escudo or Dunhill’s Royal Yacht will stand up easily to the alcohol and draw favorable accents from the fruit flavors. Let us know how that goes!
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@ docwatson : I hear ya Andy–I can hear Ned Stark intoning “WINTER IS COMING” already. Sigh. On the bright side, we have the Kaywoodie Kristmas party to look forward to! See you soon.
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@ Cortez : Enjoy the harvest, old friend.
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@ andy – Same to you (but more of it)!
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@ Pylorns : Yeah, I try to bring Data into every third article or so, if you’ve noticed. 😀
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@ Geko – wielen danke
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@ kcghost : glad you enjoyed!
gern geschehen ;p