The Pipes Magazine Radio Show – Episode 64
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- The Pipes Magazine Radio Show – Episode 64
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Kevin Godbee
- Dec 5, 2013
- 1 min read
Kevin Godbee
Thank you for joining us for The Pipes Magazine Radio Show—the only radio talk show for pipe smokers and collectors. We want to thank you for listening and being one of our loyal 15,000 weekly fans. In tonight’s “Pipe Parts” segment Brian will discuss military mounts, spigots and other pipe adornments. We will have a holiday gift guide in the mailbag segment. Our Featured Interview tonight is with Rachel Campbell. Rachel is a young, energetic and enthusiastic pipe smoker and a YouTuber. She is a delight to talk to, and to listen to. Her grandfather smoked a pipe, and then her husband smoked a pipe, so she finally became intrigued enough to do the same. Our pipes are packed, drinks are poured, the sound check is done … pack a pipe, sit back, relax and join us for The Pipes Magazine Radio Show.
Tonight’s show is sponsored by Sutliff-Tobacco.com, CupOJoes.com, SmokingPipes.com, Missouri Meerschaum, 4noggins.com, and MeerschaumStore.com, Please give them some consideration when making your next pipe or tobacco purchase.
We hope you enjoy our 50-minute show produced just for you—the pipe smoker and collector. The following link will launch a pop-up player. Alternatively, you can download the show in iTunes after the initial broadcast is complete here.
Rachel Campbell – YouTube Channel
Written by Kevin Godbee

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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 585. Our featured interview tonight is with Glen Whelan. Glen is the Director of Sales for Peterson of Dublin. Peterson is a family tradition for Glen. His father worked in the factory for 50 years, eventually serving as Factory Manager. Although Glen now serves as Director of Sales, he started as a part-time retail associate in the Peterson store at the age of 16. After more than a decade in Peterson retail, Glen joined the sales team in Sallynoggin. At the top of the show, we will have an “Ask the Pipemaker” segment with Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 584. We have a special show tonight where there will not be an interview, but we will have Jon David Cole as co-host. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and he is the former co-host of the now discontinued podcast, Country Squire Radio. Country Squire Radio ran for 10-years and is still one of the most popular pipe-niche podcasts. Brian and Jon David will be talking all things pipes and tobacco, and we will get an update on what’s new at The Country Squire. We will be preempting our usual first segment to start right off with JD. We will have the usual music, mailbag and rant at the end of the show.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 583. Our featured interview tonight is with Tanner Halligan. Tanner is from Columbus Ohio, and makes the Butterbone Briars line of pipes. He first tried pipe smoking in high school with some friends, and enjoyed it on and off. About a year ago he began making pipes part-time, but was struggling until he decided to buy some pipe making kits by RawKrafted. The kits are made at Smoker’s Haven in Columbus. Tanner went into the shop and was immediately hired by shop owner and pipe maker Premal Chheda. With Premal’s mentoring, Tanner’s pipe making skills took a big leap forward. At the top of the show, we’ll have a Pipe Smoking 101 segment on flake tobaccos.
Saturday, I spent a wonderful day at Ohlone Cigar Lounge in Fremont, CA, sharing the stage with the ever charming Joe Fabian, who was doing a “Trunk Show” of Savinelli and Peterson pipes, which evolved into being as much of a pipe club experience as it was a sales event. It was a great opportunity to spend time with a bunch of folks talking about pipes, tobacco, food, cars, the joys of rigid-frame mountain bikes, and pretty much anything else that came up. To me, this sort of fellowship is one of the best things about pipe gatherings, and I certainly look forward to doing more in-store events in the future! At one point some of us had a conversation about why we tend to prefer one size or bowl shape to another, and we all had different views to share. Some choose pipes for their weight or their balance, others for their aesthetics, still others for capacity. This got me thinking about my own collection. While some may have very specific criteria, and their pipes exhibit a certain sort of “sameness,” my collection exhibits a pretty broad range of shapes and sizes from tiny to cavernous, and each has its place. For me, choosing the pipe I want to smoke is often as much a practical decision as it is one of whim and whimsy. On the practical side, one thing that often comes up for many of us is whether or not there is time to spend with a large bowl. For me, a certain irony arises in that decision process all too often; I think I don’t have time for a long smoke, but end up burning two small bowls instead, consuming as much time as the larger bowl would have, if not more. My whacky brain is now swirling with something almost too geeky to discuss, but I’m going to anyway. If you had, let’s say, a finite amount of tobacco and wanted to maximize your smoking time, would you be better off with smaller bowls or larger ones, especially wide, squat bowls vs. narrow, tall ones? How would you choose which pipe or pipes to smoke? Tall, narrow bowls filled with the same weight of tobacco seem to have a slight edge over wide, squat ones, at least with respect to time alight. As an informal experiment tonight, I chose a Castello 55 weighing in with a chamber diameter of 23mm and depth of 35mm, and my Sea Monster bent, with its 18mm x 53mm chamber. I chose these two because they are both exquisite smokes, and have similar chamber volumes. Each was filled with the same 2g weight of a VA tobacco, packed with a gravity fill followed by a very light tamp. The Castello gave up after 32 minutes. The Sea Monster lasted 40. I guess if you were stranded on that often discussed island, and maximizing your smoking time was an important consideration, you’d be better off with the tall, narrow bowl. But smoking time is certainly not all there is to consider in selecting a pipe to smoke; other differences are at least, if not more important, especially if maximizing enjoyment is the intention. Not surprisingly, the taste of the same tobacco from each of these two bowls was quite different. The smoke from the pot was a little sweeter, a little more complex, while the taller bowl delivered a brighter, more zesty flavor. In this case, both were delightful, but that hasn’t always been true. Is there such a thing as “the right” bowl geometry for any given tobacco type? Opinions are as varied as we are, but for me, flakes tend to sing in wider bowls, delivering nuances of flavor that can be somewhat attenuated in a narrow one. Yes, this is counter to the “conventional wisdom” that pipes with narrow, tapered bowls are “Flake pipes,” and large bowls are better suited as “English mixture pipes.” Though I’d never question another’s preferences, I’m comfortable taking the contrarian position here with respect to my own. Years ago, when I was developing my first VA/Perique flake, I did what I always do, and smoked the prototypes in a variety of bowl geometries. One of the pipes I chose during my exploration was a GBD 9493, a lovat-like pot with a wide aperture and conventional billiard height. The tobacco took the center stage spotlight and sang arias in that pipe. Since, I’ve repeated the experiment many times, always with the same result. If you want to experience everything a flake has to offer, try it in a pot. Wide bowls also offer something to the burly aficionado, bringing out some of the more subtle nuances of that leaf while keeping the smoke cool. Things get perhaps more interesting when it comes to bowl height. Since tall bowls tend to concentrate more of the distillates that form when tobacco burns, they can be both harder to keep lit at the bottom, and can intensify some flavors. This can be a good or a not so good thing, depending on the tobacco type, and the smoker’s preferences. I love shag cut tobaccos in tall bowls, while flakes are just too often challenging. Too, I find that fuller latakia mixtures deliver their best in medium and smaller bowls. This might have more to do with “palate fatigue” than the smoking dynamics of a particular pipe’s bowl geometry. (Truth told, unless I’m really focused on the process, I rarely could be considered a “slow smoker,” and as my cadence rises, so does the intensity of some of latakia’s less friendly characteristics, especially as the bottom of the bowl is reached. Combine that with a tall bowl, and my tongue just gets fuzzy.) But, I’ve known many who enjoy gigantic bowls of heavy lat-bombs. Maybe this is one reason the “conventional” medium billiard bowl is, and has always been so popular. It’s kind of the middle-ground – not too tall, not too wide, and does pretty […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 582. We have a tobacco filled show for you tonight. Our featured interview is with Adam Boolen of Cloudbear Custom Blends. He became interested in pipe smoking when he walked past the Tinderbox in the Cerritos Mall while he was in high school. He smoked a pipe on and off again with years in between. When he became interested in pipes again five years ago, he downloaded a book on home tobacco blending, which eventually lead to Cloud Bear Custom Blends. 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.
This will be a bit of a stretch, a hill, a ridge too far for some of my pipe-smoking friends. Let’s just say the Pundit continues to suffer from being a mile too high. On a recent trip to Colorado, I traveled up and across Berthoud Pass, a mere 11,106 feet skyward, and later returned over the Continental Divide. Up and down, over, and beyond! Berthoud Pass is 1.4 billion years old, give or take a million. And the Continental Divide is a mere 70 million years old. Please, no jokes about Pundit’s age. It’s not in the millions. Just sayin’. Cutting across the Great Divide in Colorado—which slices through some 21 counties in the Centennial State since it earned statehood in 1876, 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence—Pundit was stunned by massive, and ever-hovering rock structures. And whether or not you are into geology and rocks, you might like to know that a couple of famous geologists (and presumably rockhounds) from way back were pipe smokers. There was John Muir, naturalist, botanist, writer, and author, who traipsed across the nation on foot! Make that a 1,000-mile trip afoot! You might recall that after viewing the phenomenal natural beauty stretched out before him in Yosemite, he convinced ol’ Rough Rider U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt to join him on a camping trip to see the land in all its geological beauty. Muir’s influence was instrumental in getting the land preserved. A natural loveliness we enjoy today, just as it was in Muir’s and Teddy’s time. And Muir had this to say of his early stint in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the heart of what is now Yosemite National Park: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe—from his book, “My First Summer in the Sierra,” 1911, page 110. John Muir was a pipe smoker. Then there is John Wesley Powell, a naturalist-geologist, like Muir. He was one of the first to float the upper Colorado River and to give the Grand Canyon its name. And from one of his observations of the canyon and its marvels: The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. John Wesley Powell too was a pipe smoker. He even swapped pipes with some of the Native Americans he encountered in the great canyonlands and elsewhere as he explored ranges and valleys. Now just hold on a bit more. I hear the boobirds in the audience trying to drown out the vistas. I see all the eye rolls. Those craggy Colorado mountains, the famous Rocky Mountains just right there nestled up to roads cut through immense solid rock structures, reminded Pundit of the beautiful sandblasts some of his pipes show off. I know, a stretch. But what is life without imagination and art? Imagine rock arrangements wrinkled in layers and stacks, lines etched into massive configurations that once reposed on the bottom of seas that once existed and have since disappeared. Returned and faded into geologic history once again. That’s right. Crags and even the look of plateau briars (that knobby rough rim of the bowl). For a better understanding of plateau shapes just head over to SmokingPipes.com. I can even hear now the loud chorus for someone to get out the stage hook on that one. But if you have ever had the opportunity to scrutinize those magnificent monoliths, you might arrive at a better understanding of the “craggy” aspect of a pipe’s outer sandblasted skin. Not to mention the pure natural beauty of our pipes and the artisan’s imagination. One of Pundit’s favorite pipe writers, Chuck Stanion at SmokingPipes.com has some wonderful stories on sandblasting. But those gigantic rocks of the ages have more lessons. They just didn’t appear in Colorado. They went through billions of years of emerging and disappearing. Oceans came, went, and returned. Some of the table mountains reminded me of a few of my Sherlock Holmes Petersons, especially the Holmes original with its calabash design. Up, flat, curved. Mark Irwin, another of the pipe world’s finest authors, has a delightful piece in his Peterson Pipe Notes about the Holmes and the history of the Peterson calabash. Which brings us to a final thought. Our pipes are born in nature as are we. We are all “hitched” together to everything else in the universe, as John Muir said. And master pipe artists provide us with a view of the past and present in their marvelous constructions. Layered, craggy, smooth, stained as is the earth in all of its past iterations. We enjoy such rich pleasure smoking these pieces of history with that fragrant leaf, tobacco in its many forms. Connected. Sometimes traveling a mile high into the great Rocky Mountains not only takes your breath away but gives us insight into other parts of our lives.
Hey Brian,
good info on the military mount and use of silver. I like a nice decorative silver band on the shank.
Nice interview with Rachel Campbell. There are a number of lady pipe smokers and the group is becoming more noticeable at shows. Sorry, just can’t get into aromatics, but each to their own.
…and of course, Clarence was a pipe smoker.
Great holiday present suggestions.
Hope you had a great time in San Antonio – Take a walk on the Riverwalk.
What a fun show tonight! Really enjoyed your conversation with Rachel. She has a lovely laugh, and an enthusiasm for pipe smoking that gives us old farts hope for the future of our beloved pastime. Great Gate! And, nice shout out to NASPC; that’s a terrific idea for a gift, a subscription that gets you their wonderful “The Pipe Collector” magazine of news, views, fiction, and even poetry.
Till we meet again, Dino.
Another great show Brian and Kev. Rachel sounds HOT!!!!
Hey Brian.
Interesting topics this week Brian enjoyed the information about how silver caps were used on pipes. I also enjoyed your interview with Rachel I hope you will have her back soon.
Brian,
I really enjoy listening to your show. I love the diversity of the people you interview on the show. Very refreshing to here a women pipe smokers perspective on the hobby. I always wondered why military pipes had metal bands? Now I know and well really just makes total sense. Keep up the great work it is very much appreciated!
Jack Carlos
Well, for me, this was an example of a show that need not be repeated. Some of the arsine comments above show one problem for/with women in pipe smoking — “She has a lovely laugh” is irrelevant for a pipe radio show and “Rachel sounds HOT!!!!”, that’s not really what pipe smoking is about either or what the purpose of this show should be.
Second, it’s difficult enough as it is, I don’t need to hear another social cover-up story from the “free” US of A, where hubby & wife go into the garage for some “us time” so that the children don’t see them smoking, and all the other stuff this woman went on about. Let her do some pipe growing up and then she might have something to say and sure.
I notice a few youngsters that you’ve been talking to recently of whom I’m not sure that I really want to hear what they have to “say” (so far, very little). Perhaps it’s a marketing strategy to get more young pipe smokers (hey, let them have their YouTube), but for a pipe radio show that also informs, this doesn’t do it for me.
Other than that, the concept of the show is still great and it is a fine service to the community. Plus, judging from the above comments, other people seem to enjoy this constant giggling and engage in their misogynistic “thought” processes. Only because you offer a fantastic show to hundreds, even thousands (?) of listeners who enjoy pipes doesn’t mean that all these people need to converge on their outlook on life beyond the pipe. So, feel free to ignore my comment, I just wanted to voice an alternative view and some content-related criticism.
Keep it up (and return to the good stuff), K
PS: With one comment asking for more of Rachel, may I suggest you put a caption/contents summary in your podcast so that when I see it in my iTunes podcast list I see the general topic (“military/silver”) and interview guest (“hot female YT presenter Rachel ‘Giggles’ Campbell sharing her irrelevant irreverence”). Even without my sarcastic comments, such as one-line contents overview IS a good idea, also for future reference when browsing through past podcasts to find that one great interview with this or that person.
I appreciate PipesMag radio show for the broad spectrum of pipe related history, personalities and industry. From neurologists, poets, pipe makers, master blenders, and tobacco industry giants to the young and energetic new pipers out there who appreciate and love pipe smoking in a world where anything dealing with tobacco is shunned; all can be found listening to Pipes Magazine Radio Show. I find that listening to the enthusiasm of newer pipe smokers to be refreshing and am happy to see the tradition carry on to the next generation. I am impressed by the show’s ability to interest pipe smokers young and old. Thank you Brian and Kevin for keeping the program fresh and interesting. Not catering to one, but to many will keep many loyal and new listeners downloading the broadcast every week.
As for the “HOT!!!” comment above, I was simply complementing my wife in my own dorky way.
Another enjoyable shoe. The “Pipe Parts” segments on military mounts was most informative. I enjoyed the interview with Rachel Campbell. She certainly seems like a most pleasant person. It didn’t do much in the way in explaining pipes and pipe history but it was an enjoyable presentation of one persons journey to pipe smoking. Sometimes we need to remember that any new comer to our hobby who is very enthusiastic about it is a true positive.
I think it was a fine show. Though Rachel is by no means an expert, I think her opinions are just as valid as anyone’s.
In the Pipe Parts segment, Brian you said how “military mounts” got their name because they were a feature created by pipe makers and intended FOR military members. I’d always heard that they were created BY military members in the field as a way of fitting broken stems and shanks using (among other things) spent shell casings.
I guess there’s no way to be sure, but what do the rest of you think?
Brian, thank you for keeping the show diverse. I don’t expect you to have a legend of the pipe industry every week and I enjoyed Rachel’s point of view on the hobby.
Nate, feel free to call your wife hot all you want.
Kakis, someday when you grow up and get married I hope you tell your wife the same. 🙂
I smiled my way through Rachel’s interview. Her gigglie excitement made my bleak day brighter!! 😯
Brian and Kevin, thanks again for doing the interview with me. I am by no means an expert, nor do I claim to be. I’m learning that my tastes in tobacco may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but that’s ok. I giggle when I’m nervous. I don’t smoke around my children because I don’t, but if one wants to smoke in his house, have at it. What I love most about all the people in the pipe smoking community is their openness and acceptance of everyone. What we have in common is the pipe and our love of it, and what differs doesn’t really matter.
Thanks again,
Rachel
I just got to listen to this episode last night & truly enjoyed it. Thanks Brian & Rachel for a great show.
The last few weeks Brian’s been asking for our holiday pipe traditions. Well, I don’t know if this fits your definition but here goes…
My wife & I were married 3 years ago on the 11th of December & as her wedding present I gave up cigars & cigarettes. I was allowed to keep the pipe as long as I stayed outside with it.
On our honeymoon, she picked up a tin of McClelland’s Christmas Cheer 2010. I shoved it in a desk drawer & honestly forgot about having it for almost a year.
Now, on our anniversary, she gives me a tin of that years blend & I get my one indoor pipe of the year as we decorate our tree
Rachel, thanks again for taking the time to do the interview. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to you.