Estate Pipes Central
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Kevin Godbee - Nov 7, 2017
- 3 min read
A. Miller
If you’ve ever gone antiquing, it’s likely you’ve rolled in to a location (usually outside of most towns) where there is more than one antique shop. While technically competitors, the nature of these shops being near one another makes it so that you can visit one place, and have opportunity to visit more than one antique shop. The shopper’s benefit, and as a result the sellers do too.
This is the same premise for the recently launched Estate Pipes Central—the brain child of Mkelaw Pipe’s Dave Neeb. I spoke to him recently about the genesis of the site and what they’re looking to do. Now, Estate Pipes Central could be a conglomerate of every person and company selling estate pipes that could be found. But this was not the intention for Dave. The very point was to gather well-known, reputable online retailers to one convenient location.
Things have since progressed rather quickly, each member has sought to promote the site separately on whatever email lists or other forms of communication they have with their customers, and things have grown.
While there may be more folks added in the future, right now it consists of:
Blue Room Briars – Scott Townsend
Pulvers’ Briar – Marty Pulvers
Walker Briar Works – Dave Wolff
Before the creation of Estate Pipes Central a few of the guys knew each other better than others. Dave Wolff and Dave Neeb have been friends for ten years, and Wolff even helped build Neeb’s website. Then Mike Gluker and Marty Pulvers knew each other, one pulled in another and finally Dave Neeb reached out to Scott Townsend.
"Nobody needed a lot of convincing," Dave said, "And there are no real roles, we just sort of do things by consensus, everything has been informal governance wise."
But the standards are kept high, he pointed out, no one is selling any junk, typically what you’ll find on any of these sites are quality pipes.
I then dug a bit in to Dave’s history. He wove a story for me while puffing away on a sandblast pipe built to be like Dunhill’s Cherrywood shape with a bamboo shank—one he’d made himself. And that was part of where he got started, restoring pipes and making your own. When he makes a pipe that has some kind of mistake or the briar doesn’t cooperate , he adds it to his own collection. And the process of restoring pipes helped him in learning the art and craft of making them.
As for tobacco, Dave sticks pretty much entirely to a blend called Black Stoker from Uhle’s in Milwaukee. He was on a golf course a number of years back and his group was joined by a stranger who saw he was smoking his pipe and inquired about what blend Dave was enjoying at the time. Dave told him and he responded, "I’ve got something you’ll probably like better." Turns out the gentlemen was Jack Uhle himself—and Black Stoker has been the default since.
Then our conversation turned to getting into estate pipes. "About 18 years ago," Dave continued, "I had a bunch of pipes I wasn’t smoking, so I decided to try this e-Bay thing. I became a member in 1999, but before I sold anything, first I had to buffer and clean my own my pipes." Then he started buying up groups of pipes from estate sales and reading up online about how to restore old pipes. "I did e-Bay for about 5 years, but I got tired of being on e-Bay’s schedule." I pressed on this point and he mentioned that there is a practical matter that if you want a pipe to sell for as much as possible the auction needs to end on a Sunday, which means you have to list them on a Thursday, and you can’t go very long without having new things listed or people will forget about you. It becomes a constant churn with a specific schedule. There’s also the e-Bay fee (a percentage of the sale). Which drove him to set out on his own.
Here we are years later, Dave has built a reputation for himself and he’s still buying up and restoring old pipes. Now, together with these few other guys, they’ve built a place where estate buyers can go and peruse several sites looking for the right pipe that speaks to them.
If you’re a fan of estate pipes, you can buy them from a handful of places, but be sure to swing by and check out the fraternity that has sprung from the fine gentlemen at Estate Pipes Central.
Written by Kevin Godbee
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When I first started with the pipe as a quirky and precocious teen, the only tutelage I had at my disposal were scenes from old movies in which a well dressed chap would stick his pipe into a pouch, scoop tobacco into the bowl and press it down unceremoniously with his thumb. Then, with great flourish, he’d strike a match and light the thing with all manner of cinematic excess, puffing up vast clouds of smoke falling just short of completely obscuring his visage. While it may look good on film, it’s a terrible approach to actually enjoying the thing. Somehow, though, this “technique” seems to have survived in the contemporary vernacular, at least to some extent, even with bit-loads of information handily at our fingertips that should dissuade us from the practice. 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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 604. Our featured interview tonight is with Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and he is the former co-host of the podcast, Country Squire Radio, which ended their 10-year run last year. We’ll have JD with the “From the Country Squire” segment talking about all the new things happening at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, we’ll continue our audio tour of Brian’s pipe collection.
Before we begin, I should tell you: this tobacco review is being written by an A.I. Not the fancy new GPTs or their ilk; no, this is last century’s meat-and-bone, all-organic model. To be fair, a large part of what we call knowledge is merely the accumulated perceptions and impressions gathered from a life wandered through, synthesized into a spongy mass of what-it-is-that-we-think-that-we-know. The algorithm for this prompt is simple enough: pump thousands of bowls of smoldering plant matter into a gaping maw, cross-reference the chemical sensations with all other matter previously ingested or inhaled, sieve it all through the diffuse and fractal twin lens of memory and emotion, and churn out a panoply of adjectives that attempts to convey the sensations to someone who hasn’t experienced it yet. Odds are that a diligently trained monkey could succeed half the time; if this reviewer nears fifty-one percent then that would qualify as an unrivaled success. There must have been some similar musings perambulating through the mind of Per Jensen when he began his mad scientist routine at Sutliff with the Pipe Force project, which brings us to the current mixture under the microscope—Sutliff’s Pipe Force: Episode I. Here again are the unusual ingredients that engendered the series, with the stoved Rustica being the defining voice in this composition. From the tin: The Latakia-forward English mixture offers plenty of smoky flavor from the fire-cured leaf, which is artfully harmonized with floral, earthy Stoved Rustica. A mixture of high-grade Virginias imparts a natural sweetness. Katerini, the sole Oriental component, offers herb and spice notes bringing complexity and nuance to the flavor profile. It’s certainly Latakia-forward, with the stoved Rustica doubling up on the rhythm section like a second bassist. A first whiff from the tin releases the aromas of shoe leather and hide glue in a base of clay soil with a campfire wafted over it like last night’s beach party. Once it’s been accustomed to oxygen again, subtle hints of sweetness poke through from the Virginias: lemon rind, light milk chocolate, the dregs of a peaty Scotch, and muddled cherry. Old regulars like fresh-sawn oak and tilled earth are there, of course, with distinct notes of truffle, creosote, damp peat, and pine bark mulch. As an aside, I’ve been re-potting my camellias and the similarity of aroma to the ericaceous soil mix is notable; the Katerini really brings the unique depth of its vegetal complexion when supported by the Rustica and afforded more voice in the mix. The smoky Cyprian Latakia, in turn, is backed by equal earthiness from the Rustica, which overall exhibits a profile similar to dark-fired Kentucky; it leans more toward the woody and vegetal end of that spectrum, echoing and amplifying those traits of the other constituents. The tobacco is presented pressed and cut into a couple of thick, hearty flakes in the tin, lightly moist and easily crumbled to prepare—I prefer mine with a bit of drying time. The out-of-this-world tin art for this episode in the series is Major O’Meara smoking a cavalier. In the absence of confirmation, I’m going to hazard a guess he’s of the Ithklur species. The first taste from the light is sweet, with hints of that milk chocolate dancing around the edges. The Virginia leads the smoke through the top of the bowl, and orchestrates it well. Thoroughly smoky with lemony, grassy highlights from the Virginia spectrum, it soon segues into the mid-bowl profile: heartier, smokier, with the flavor leaning to the mildly acrid and tangy tinge that is the campfire-esque signature of English blends. Caution advised, it can turn overly bitter if pushed—this is where one’s sipping technique is required to maintain the fullness of flavor through to the heel. I did tend toward a lot of relights, though it may have as much to do with technique as with the blend. Pacing is also important as the nicotine starts to manifest; though the Rustica’s contribution has been tempered well by the stoving, it can certainly upend an empty stomach. At the end of every bowl, the mouthfeel somehow gets better. The balance of sugars in the tobaccos would seem to be spot-on in this regard. I started out my tasting in cobs, then cut short an unpleasant bowl in a meer, and finally landed on my best instrument with the lovely Dunhill 4427 pictured, a quaint group 4 shell briar with a gentle curve and Cumberland stem supporting a perfectly executed acorn bowl. It surprised me here, as I’ve learned through the years that I generally have the best experience with English blends in large, wide bowls. With this blend it seems that to get the best out of the Katerini’s somewhat diaphanous influence the smaller bowl fared much better. Room note is very English, so the company you keep will either love it or hate it, and it doesn’t linger too much. I find it paired best with a strong coffee; Sumatran beans complement the flavors well, as do Ethiopian if a lighter brew is preferred. Overall impressions of the blend are that it’s a curiously interesting take on the English genre, almost a reductive reconstruction of the theme using the unique components. This blend, if nothing else, expanded my vocabulary of sense perceptions with the uniquely treated leaf. While the average human can distinguish approximately one trillion (1,000,000,000,000!) different aromas, multiplied by seven basic tastes, and wholly dependent on variables from body chemistry to atmospheric conditions, our overworked and underpaid simian brains can’t effectively catalog them all. Our pet adding machines are exceedingly good at this, however, and someday soon they’ll be the ultimate and unequivocal authority on what something tastes, smells, looks, or even feels like. Until that time, friends, revel in the moments that can be stolen to savor over a bowl of Pipe Force: Episode I.
Looks like a great idea. I have done business with Briar Blues, and was pleased with my purchase. Glad to have a central source for other high-quality estate pipe folks.