Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 650
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Kevin Godbee - Feb 25, 2025
- 1 min read
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 650. Our featured guests tonight are Jonni Adams and Grey Van Kuilenburg. Jonni makes the J. Adams line of pipes. He is originally from Leeds in West Yorkshire, England, and moved to the US in 1997. Grey makes the Van Kuilenburg line of pipes. He is a tattoo artist full time, and also hand carves custom electric guitars and basses for the last 30-years. Both Jonni and Grey have been making pipes for five years. They will be telling us about their trip to Denmark to work with Tom Eltang. At the top of the show Brian will answer a listener question about aging flake tobaccos.
Brian Levine
Episode 650. Jonni Adams and Grey Van Kuilenburg Interview
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The Pipes Magazine Radio Show features interviews with pipe makers, tobacco blenders, pipe and tobacco aficionados, collectors, and more. Episodes air every Tuesday.
Our show is sponsored by SmokingPipes.com, Cornell & Diehl, Missouri Meerschaum, Savinelli Pipes and Tobaccos, Peterson Pipes and TinBids. Please give them some consideration when making your next pipe or tobacco purchase.
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Written by Kevin Godbee
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 654. Our featured interview tonight is with Rich Esserman. Rich is one of our regular guests that has been on the show many times, and is returning after a one-year hiatus. Rich has penned innumerous articles about pipes and tobacco for several publications, and he is known for collecting quite large pipes. We’ll get caught up with Rich and see what’s new with him. At the top of the show in our Pipe Parts segment Brian will talk about the “Delayed Gratification Technique” or “DTG” as we call it in the forums.
Way… way… back in 2023, at the Chicago Pipe Show, Adam Floyd and Nick Masella (Get Piped) showed up with cameras, mics, and a dream to make a new pipe documentary. Their subject was the first of its kind, “Battle of the Briar,” pitting three pipe makers against each other in a one-hour, no-holds-barred competition to see which one could produce the best pipe in a time crunch. It was in a sense, the first ever “Reality TV Style” Battle of the Briar, which was the brainchild of Jeff Gracik (J Alan Pipes). Should you watch this documentary? Yes. Ok, review over. I kid. I kid. Frankly, I’ve put off writing a documentary review about an event I was at as it’s not typically something I write about. In fact, the last movie review I wrote was when I was in high school writing for the newspaper, doing a movie review of the re-released Star Wars movies back in the ’90s. So, without spoiling anything? 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Adam, a consummate storyteller, manages to skirt the basics we all understand with the nuanced enjoyment of smoking a pipe so as not to be off-putting to the die-hard pipe-smoking hobbyist. It took the Get Piped team these past 2 years to edit, massage, and tease out a story that would keep the viewer interested and engaged till the very end. With a runtime of 55 minutes there was a lot of video to go through and package into a concise documentary that sucks you in to know what happened even if you already knew. What you missed if you were there were the details, the interviews with each of the contestants, the back story, and, of course, Steve Fallon (The Pipe Stud) falling down on the floor. In fact, that happened last year too. You’ll have to watch the video to find out why. “The whole thing was Jeff’s brainchild. When he first pitched it to me I thought he was crazy. 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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 653. Our featured interview tonight is with Simon Bosko from the YouTube Channel London Calling with Simon. He also produces the LCS Briars line of handmade pipes. London Calling has over 9,000 subscribers and over 2,000 videos. In his pipe making, Simon focuses mainly on 9mm filter pipes in both classic shapes and artistic styles. Simon has lived in London his entire life. He bought his first pipe, which was a Butz-Choquin at the Segar and Snuff Parlour in Covent Garden. At the top of the show in our Pipe Parts segment, we will have Brian’s last discussion on the fallout of the STG buyout of Mac Baren and Sutliff with the mass discontinuation of tobaccos.
There has been a lot written about the Lakeland style of tobaccos over the past couple of centuries. Perhaps nothing else in the tobacco world is quite as polarizing, tending to segregate folks into camps of loving it or despising it with uncharacteristic vehemence. This month’s inspection of an American rendition of the Lakeland style will add just a few more words to the volumes that have come before, but in the interest of topicality I’ll avoid the larger debates, histories, and comparisons, limiting our purview to the experience of this blend alone. Though it’s the earliest hint of an impending spring now, I began sampling this tobacco in the fall. At first, it was mild and pleasant, lightly aromatic, and earthy in a very appealing way. However, when winter’s foul weather hit, I moved on to other tastes. 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The downside of this, of course, being that when the ingredients run out, it’s up to the caprice of the marketplace to find some more to restock. He assured me that Catawba River and the other blends […]
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Some good thoughts on the question of storing flake tobacco. I’d be very interested in the results of your experiment. I guess I’ll have to stick around for another two years. I’m sure some of your listeners have already tried this.
Jonni and Grey were wonderful guests. I greatly enjoyed their reminiscence about the visit with Tom Eltang, working with him and highlighting some of his techniques and processes.
“In Memory H.H.L.” by Dan Locklair was a lovely and moving tribute to his mother.
Congrats on passing your Disney MDA. I’m glad you never gave up.
Thanks for another “always entertaining” show.
Dino