Ask Hank 20: Chemical Responses to Other Chemicals, and Cheating
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Kevin Godbee - Jun 20, 2017
- 6 min read
A. Miller
I had a ton of a Virginia/Perique I particularly love that I may or may not have neglected and which eventually ended up dried out. Rather than try to rehydrate—with water I’m never sure is pure enough—I decided to blend it with McClelland 5100, an old staple, and to throw in some Old Joe Krantz for a good kick in the pants (not a coincidence the two rhyme).
I’m now surveying my perfectly mowed lawn (a first for me to complete to this high of standard) and enjoying a bowl of it in a pipe I made myself. The combination makes me feel like a big deal except that I’ve never grown a tobacco plant and might never be competent enough to do so myself (read: exceedingly brown thumb). But a self-made blend in a self-made pipe is a glorious thing. Both taste better in the presence of one another.
And this lawn looks really very good, I don’t care what my neighbors report to the HOA.
Now, on to the questions.
Dear Hank,
I use Bic lighters for my pipes because I’m lazy, matches are hard in the frequent wind I experience, and I feel like a pipe lighter is just an expensive way to buy a Bic lighter. I’m a huge fan of Bic pens. But are the fancy lighters all they’re cracked up to be? Am I missing out?
Fear Of Missing Out—John on Long Island
Dear FOMO John on Long Island,
Have you ever used a really expensive pen? Have you ever noticed that both are capable of writing?
There are three kinds of people in this world:
1) Those that purchase affordable items so they can own their things.
2) Those that purchase outlandishly expensive items so they can be owned by their things. (This isn’t inherently wrong mind you, just a different worldview).
3) Those that want to feel a tinge of guilt when they spend the weekend at their friend’s cabin in the woods and only notice after they drive several hours back to their house that they left their lighter at said cabin. Also those whom want to experience an emotion when they realize they just backed their car out of their driveway and smashed their favorite lighter with their brand new tires.
Since I fall neither in to category two or three (there are enough um… darn emotions in life to manufacture them over foolishness in my humble opinion), I am a Bic man, through and through.
That said, yes the fancy lighters are better.
Using the second or third best as long as I can remember,
Hank
Dear Hank,
I’ve recently moved from cigars to pipes and found the change to be quite enjoyable, though not as much easier on my pocket book as I had expected. But this weekend I ignored a new expensive artisan pipe I recently purchased and chose to enjoy an Arturo Fuente [a cigar] of which I’m quite a fan tonight.
When I do this I feel like I’m cheating. Am I cheating? Are there any pipe blends that have a true cigar-like taste?
Francesco in Rome
Dear Francesco in Rome,
I would like the be the first to call you terrible names and mock you mercilessly for your lack of faithfulness. While most of the people who do so are just doing so to make themselves feel better, I do it for the same reasons. So… stop being a cigar-sucking son of a motherless goat.
Now to move on, maybe you’re cheating, but the only way to truly know if you’re a cheater is to look around your home for regular household items and roll them in roll-your-own-cigarette paper. I suggest starting with the contents of a Lipton tea bag. If you find yourself coughing and dragging yourself across your kitchen floor screaming, “I just want my pipe back,” then you’re not a cheater. If you escalate to pieces of paper towel mixed with your dried tamale leftovers from your uncle’s retirement party, and then moving on to rolling the filament from that broken fluorescent lightbulb in your basement, then yes—you have a problem and your cheating knows no bounds.
One option (to be perceived as a pipe smoker instead of a scummy cheating McCheater) is to just buy a few cigars and use your cigar cutter to make small slices which you can either pack directly, or rub out before you stuff your pipe. To carry this out to its full effect, purchase a rope of Gawith and Hoggarth’s Happy Brown Bogie—just enough you can peel off the outer layer or two of it and wrap your pipe bit in the leaf. Otherwise you’ll find that little in the pipe world quite correlates to the feeling of chewing on the tobacco directly. But when in a pinch, you’ll find this is a good workaround.
Keep in mind, all of us occasionally partake of a cigar, nicotine patch, or tobacco flavored sunflower seeds when we’re incapable of finding the real thing.
Chewing on some of my favorite flake because…. well why the hell not,
Hank
Dear Hank,
Sometimes I eat a little too much for dinner and I smoke my pipe late in the evening to help with digestion. Is this normal? Are there others that do this too?
My wife says I’ve lost it,
Bloated Aubrey in LA
Dear Bloated Aubrey in LA,
It’s actually a long-held belief that a pipe helps you digest, and I think you’ll find it widely practiced amongst those of us who love briar (or cob, or clay, or… whatever). Actually I feel like most of my life is using chemicals to control the feelings I’m experiencing as a result of other chemicals.
Just the other night I decided to treat my kids to a 1/4 pound of candy from a fancy candy store and thought I’d stock myself up on Spree and Runts while I was at it. I devoured them constantly on the way home and found myself done with both before we made it back. I almost never eat candy and the sugar high was making me uncomfortably twitchy. To offset this I headed to the porch with a full bowl of Five Brothers, a long time favorite for when I need a serious kick of nicotine. I find a pipe hastens the spike and then subsequent crash of my blood sugar—which, obviously, is what I was going for. Unfortunately the brothers proved slightly too potent and I found myself walking in to the house sweating and feeling almost dizzy from such low blood sugar.
This led to my pouring myself a tall glass of bourbon to even things out. Eventually my body breaks the alcohol down to simple sugar (probably not much better than the Spree and Runts of earlier in the same evening), but first it causes a tremendous calm to come over me. Then to avoid waking up in the middle of the night with a sugar high, I simply drank much more bourbon.
This meant the morning started off slow. I’m old enough to know how to supplement my alcohol with water so I never have a headache in the morning, but I still found myself groggy and anything but quick. Nothing a little dip in to my kids sugar stashes (while they were still asleep) couldn’t solve….
Anyhow. Yes it’s normal. I’ve heard the digestive aid is as simple as swallowing the extra saliva your mouth produces while smoking. But don’t believe that hogwash. Never try to understand our mythical leaf or it will lose its mythical powers. I simply choose to believe that the solution to almost all of my life’s problems can be solved with a little burning of gloriousness in a bowl.
Not at all hopped up on anything at all right now, I swear I’m completely feeling fine and mellow and relaxed and everything right now, I swear it, not hopped up at all,
Hank
Written by Kevin Godbee
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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. 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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.
Well there’s nothing like a touch of the plague to usher in the changing season. Leaving the airport just when the first advertisements for all things pumpkin spice began to appear—lattes, muffins, shampoos, trash bags, and myriad other concoctions—so, too, my ability to breathe freely disappeared. The unfortunate side effect of losing one’s sense of taste and smell for weeks is the utter inability to enjoy tobacco. Not that I consider myself an expert on anything but my own tastes, but be forewarned that this review was made with mildly impugned sensory equipment. Just when a comforting pipe was most needed, its comfort was denied. Be that as it may, the road to recovery found me limping along on one lung this past month, trying to wrest the particulars of two blends on offer from Sutliff: the latest 175th Anniversary blend, Silver Quarter, as well as their spooky seasonal Maple Shadows II. Silver Quarter is a new style on offer from Sutliff, their first coin-cut blend. Naturally a Virginia-Perique, it is enhanced with a traditional core of black Cavendish. In the tin it holds much promise, with a lightly bready and very woody, if ever-so-slightly sour, aroma. After some time acclimating to air, the bouquet softens further and offers hints of the burley with some chocolaty notes wafting through the more dominant dry grassy aspect. The tin art is of a coin-style bas-relief bust, presumably of a founding Sutliff brother, à la The Old Boss On the reverse of the tin we find the blend’s description: Reflecting on Sutliffs 175 years of tobacco excellence, we came across a brand that embodies true value, SILVER QUARTER. This name pays homage to Sutliffs roots, the legacy of two brothers who popularized pipe smoking in the burgeoning mining society of San Francisco. We celebrate this heritage with a coin cut composed of the finest African Virginias, complemented by a core of Perique and Black Cavendish. The tin notes are, forgive the pun, on the nose for a good VaPer blend: mild tart sweetness peeking out from behind dried hay and slight chocolate undertones, with a lightly tannic finish of weathered oak. It is always a joy to prepare a coin cut, my preference being to put a few in my palm and vigorously warm my hands together to fully break them apart. These well-formed discs pack and light easily, and smoke with little prodding to the end of the bowl. For technical points it scores well—it smokes light, and it’s easy to tend the ember. While it gets sharp after a few quick bowls, pacing should be heeded to easily smoke down to the heel without inviting bite. Of the flavor, though, I am left a bit wanting. There are tart and high notes aplenty, but very little of the lemony citrus I would anticipate, as well as scant midtones; they tend more toward the red wine-vinegary and sour. The flavors are muted, also, lacking the sweetness and piquancy of other marques—the small measure of Perique tickles the nose now and again with peppery hints, and there is a smidge of a deeper sweetness to be found in the Cavendish from puff to puff, but overall it lacks some dynamism. The Virginias, to my palate, come off a bit on the dry side, and here they dominate the blend. The aftertaste and mouthfeel are neutral, again evincing more of the dry, woody, tartly tannic end of the spectrum. The blend has plenty of polish, but not enough depth or richness (*yet) to make it a standout. Here, comparisons are inevitable: Luxury Bullseye Flake has more sweetness, both from its Virginia as well as its Cavendish, and a better finish; Davidoff is similar but with a pronounced umami that is absent here; as for Escudo, I haven’t had any fresh tins lately so it would be unfair to compare. 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With a sweet coffee or tea to accompany, the aftertaste of the maple is reinvigorated on the palate […]
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Vegas Baby The show started out strong on the 14th floor hospitality suites hosted by the Vegas Pipe Show and Smoking Pipes as well as room hopping to carvers, estate sellers, and vendors to pre-game for the festivities. If you’re interested in what that looks like I’ll refer you to last years pipe show round up. I circled with Brian Levine to get the totals in comparison to last year: This year’s show numbers: 108 Exhibitor tables, 445 attendees, 3,250 Raffle Tickets, 100ish dinners, 172 Rooms in the Hotel. Last year, by comparison, 107 exhibitor tables, 425 attendees, 2,200 raffle tickets, 104 dinners, and 175 rooms on Friday and Saturday nights. We were at capacity, basically, when it came to vendor tables and the dinner, so there is no physical room for growth at this point except for attendees. That said, we filled that smoking lounge to the brim. New Carvers Spotlight Garret Woo (Pipes by Woo) How long have you been carving? Garret: I’ve been carving since 2021, and I’m guessing your next question is probably how’d you get started carving? James: Yes. Garret: In 2021 I took a break from my full time job – that included machining and assembly work and I thought maybe it was time I made something that I would like and I started looking at youtube and Instagram and putting together my shop. I did struggle on the stems to start and there was a lot of failure at the beginning. James: How many pipes have you made so far? Garret: I number my pipes, so I just finished up 186. James: What is your favorite shape you’ve been making? Garret: I really dig Canadians and pipes with longer shanks and lovat Canadian blends. I like to play with different shapes of stems on the longer shanked pipes. The billiard would be my go-to shape but I want to learn more techniques on freehanded shapes. I like to put brass and copper adornments on my pipes with my machining background it helps. James: What is the craziest thing you’ve seen at this show? Garret: The first thing that comes to mind is the table over there with C-Pipes with the shapes and the size and petiteness and the intricate details they did. You can check out what Garret is working on by going to his Instagram. Stefan Cashwell James: how long have you been carving? Stefan: about 3 years. James: What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen at the show? Stefan: The Adam Davidson pipe with the clear shape and the bamboo—I don’t know if it’s 3D printed or what, but it’s amazing. James: What’s your favorite shape to do? Stefan: That’s a tough question. I think they’re all the same shape, but what’s fascinating is that Dublin, volcano, and blowfish are all the same depending on how you turn them. Playing with that, with all its variations, is a lot of fun. My favorite accent to use is also horn; it’s finicky, but it’s a great accent on pipes. You can check out Stefan’s work on his Instagram. Science: Meet Pipes I chatted with Chris from the San Diego Pipe Club; he started off doing stem replacements for estate pipes but also improved the airflow. James: How are you doing 3d printing? What is the thought process? Chris: It’s a 3D-printed pipe with a briar insert. The design is a calabash meets a Peterson system meets a metal Falcon/Kirsten radiator style. It is a bottom draft smoking bowl like a radiator like those metal pipes. The inside chamber is a calabash. The stummel and accent rings in the stems are all 3d printed. The insert is briar, olive wood, or I have the potential to use meerschaum as well. This idea came about through the San Diego Pipe Club, wanting to see if we could 3D print a pipe and being curious about the technology; I have a printer and design ability, so here we are. James: What’s the type of plastic you’re using? Chris: It’s all PLA plastic, a renewable potato starch plastic that is food-safe. The stummels are printed with a plastic that has wood in it 40% wood fiber, bamboo, rosewood, ebony, redwood, and walnut are the woods I’m printing. For the accent rings I just got a new material that I’m printing that has 40% copper, so its real metal that you can sand, and polish the same as wood filament. The stems are 3d printed as well. The concept is renewable and cheap from a production standpoint, with the ability to make a very high quality smoking pipe based on the experience. By combining the calabash system pipe and bottom draft hole and using 3d simulations to see airflow, I can see where I’m having eddies and ripples in my current, and see where my moisture and all the particles are dropping back out from a vapor to a liquid. Most people who have tried these say the stems are clean, and they don’t even have to run a pipe cleaner afterward because everything collects at the bottom. Chris has also been experimenting with color-changing plastics so you can see the hotspots. Chris said he was able to use this to slow down his cadence, which, of course, could mean you could get a slow-smoke training pipe to teach yourself to perform better. If you’re interested in learning more or want to check one out, you can contact him on Instagram: Copper Beard Pipe Works The Negative Space The show was buzzing about one specific pipe, which had everyone guessing how it was made. I chatted with Adam Davidson briefly about it. James: How did this idea come to fruition? Adam Davidson: Smokingpipes.com had an expo back in August open to all of the makers they carry. The theme was to make a pipe utilizing bamboo. Given that the last time we had the expo I made a smooth Almond with three bamboo shanks, […]
