Cornell & Diehl Sunday Picnic Review

It’s been quite some time since I sat down to write one of these reviews, so naturally I turned to a blend that is an old favorite—Cornell & Diehl’s Sunday […]

One quarter of the year 2021 is gone already. It’s as if each upcoming moment turns to the one before it and says, “Hey dude, hold my beer.” For example, […]

It surprises a few people when they learn I write my reviews in a small, outdoor space barely big enough to fit two folding chairs, attached to an expensive apartment […]

November 21, 2023 Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 584

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.
November 14, 2023 Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 583

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.
November 13, 2023 Musings on Pipe Clubs and Pipe Sizes

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 […]
November 7, 2023 Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 582

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.
November 3, 2023 A Mile High and Connected

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.
October 31, 2023 Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 581

Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 581. Our featured interview tonight is with Grey Van Kuilenburg. Grey makes the Van Kuilenburg line of pipes. He has always been into art and design, and he started drawing seriously when he was just three years old. He is a tattoo artist full time, and also hand carves custom electric guitars and basses for the last 30-years. Grey started smoking pipes at the Original Tinder Box in Santa Monica, CA, and Brian McNulty took him under his wing, learning the ropes of doing repairs and cleaning, and then started making pipes. He’s been making pipes for three years now. At the top of the show we will have a Pipes 101 segment discussing the different cuts of pipe tobacco.