A New Castello Provides ZERO Taste... WTF!

[hoosierpipeguy]

I've had a couple of pipes where the interior bowl seemed like slate. Didn't want to build a cake and seemed to deaden the flavor of the tobacco put into it. When smoked enough, cake will build and smoke okay. But never really smoked great. Hope you have better luck with the Castello.

 

[oldgeezersmoker]

I've packed this pipe tight with Frog Morton, in hopes it will "season" with a bit of flavor.
Am I crazy to think this may work? I'm wondering if anyone else has tried this method to help with flavor.

Crazy? I wouldn’t go that far. But if you want to treat a Castello like a cob or meer, that is up to you.

When Frog Morton first cane out, I was with Andy Herbruck, visiting our mutual friend Feathers Thompson. One of us had picked up a can of Frog from Barry Levin’s initial shipment from McC. Riding in Feather’s Sburban on the way from his home in Connell, Washington to his cabin on Couer d’alene Lake in Idaho, we all were enjoying the Frog.

But we were smoking Castellos (in Andy’s case, he might have been smoking an Ashton) that we had broken in slowly and carefully with straight Virginia’s or more or less straight Burleys.

None of us would have ever dreamed of smoking Frig or any Latakia mixture or a Lakeland in a brand new Castello

That other new Castellos you have smoked have agreed with you in the face of such abuse ???? can be chalked up to @jpberg ’s explanation, metaphysics, which produces good things as well as bad.

 

[oldgeezersmoker]

I've had a couple of pipes where the interior bowl seemed like slate. Didn't want to build a cake and seemed to deaden the flavor of the tobacco put into it. When smoked enough, cake will build and smoke okay. But never really smoked great. Hope you have better luck with the Castello.

As @sasquatch has pointed out elsewhere on this forum, 10 year plus aged briar like Castello uses is a different animal entirely. Even if “load it up and go” works for you on most pipes, that technique will never, ever, get all out of a Castello that a new one has to offer.

 

[sasquatch]

It's tough to talk about briar as a medium without sounding mystical or even just a little stupid. I've had something like 8 new Castellos I guess, and most of them smoked unproblematically from the get go, but none of them dazzled me either. And a couple tasted really strange, honestly, a sort of lakeland flavor, like rosewater burbled up in the first bowls in a couple. That's not a briar flavor, that's something splashed into or soaked up by the pipe after manufacture. (Possibly sitting next to a bag of Condor in a display window? Possibly a little je ne sais quoi at the factory....)

I think in general a "bare bowl" pipe (no pre-carb coating) will have a slightly muting effect on any tobacco, the edges will be taken off the flavor as the briar is absorbing a little, and adding a little - a slightly corky flavor is pretty common in Italian wood for example (as opposed to a slightly cinnamon-like note in Algerian, and slightly earthy flavors in greek wood). So I don't think it's uncommon for a new Castello or Ardor, Don Carlos, Radice etc, any of the "bare wood" brands, to be a little shy at first. But they build into tremendous pipes with just a little use.

Castello has good quality wood, and with some age on it, it breaks in pretty fast and without much fuss. I see them as pretty linear, good smokers that get great with a few uses.

But if you have never had a bare-wood bowl before, I can see it being a slightly off putting experience. I look forward to it myself, part of my aquaintance with the pipe, part of the relationship I am building, learning what the pipe tastes like, how open the draw is, what it seems to be best at smoking, what I'm going to use it for. This, to me, is part of the beauty of pipe smoking. There is an interplay between pipe and pipe smoker, something like a musical instrument. Guitars all have six strings but a Fender shallow-V and a Gibson neck feel totally different. And both are good.

I smoke the shit out of my Castellos, they hit a sweet spot for me of price, quality, one-of-a-kindness, and they have a playful countenance and a serious soul. Well made pipes mostly, with a little eccentricity. So don't give up on that thing, just quit expecting a miracle. The miracle may come in time, it may not. There are people who don't find value in Castellos, there are people who don't find much value in briars of any kind. So be it.

 

[oldgeezersmoker]

I smoke the shit out of my Castellos, they hit a sweet spot for me of price, quality, one-of-a-kindness, and they have a playful countenance and a serious soul.

I have had a love affair with the brand since I got my first one in 1981. That love was made flaming hot when I saw Chuck Rio’s Collection displayed at the first show I ever attended in Chattanooga TN in 1985.

i have used lots of adjectives to describe Castellos in the intervening years. I just never thought of them as having a playful countenance and a serious soul.

 

[LikeDadDid]

I think in general a "bare bowl" pipe (no pre-carb coating) will have a slightly muting effect on any tobacco, the edges will be taken off the flavor as the briar is absorbing a little, and adding a little

I didn't hear this mentioned in one maker's lengthy discussion of why he only sells his pipes bare-bowl. But I'm guessing that if your were making pipes (are you?) you would sell them coated, yes? Or is the getting-to-know-you phase important enough that you'd nevertheless sell them bare?

 

[sasquatch]

I sell pipes bare most of the time. I will coat if someone prefers it, and when I do I use a recipe that I find unobtrusive (and full of sugar so it chars onto the wood).

It's not something I find pleasant or an improvement, for a pipe to have a coating of some kind. At best, it's not actively bad, at worst, I've had coatings that tasted bad, that turned into slime, that actually filled the airway and made the pipe difficult to smoke, that eventually shattered off in big shards of cake..... no, I'll take a bare bowl for choice.

John Bain wrote a hundred years ago: "Put in your tobacco but don't fill it quite to the top of the bowl. Be careful, in lighting your tobacco, not to burn the rim of the bowl. Smoke very leisurely at first, gently breaking in your pipe, until every part of it seems to be hardened to the heat. Keep this up for 5 or 6 smokes. Then you and your pipe can "rough it" anywhere on earth."

This seems to me to be a really good thought, it's not about building cake per se, but about inuring the pipe to this frightening heat.

People smoke pipes for different reasons, and in different ways. There are guys who have 900 pipes and smoke each of them 5 times over 20 years. There are guys who will buy a pipe and smoke it 900 times even if it's a horrible smoker, hoping to "cure" it somehow. There are guys like me who nerd out about pipes and find the minutiae of the smoking experience important. There's no right or wrong about it, just as there's no right or wrong about preferring billiards to bulldogs or Spanish briar to Italian (but of course a billiard made from Spanish briar will be better than a bulldog made from Italian briar, everyone KNOWS that).

 

[Sweet Home Alabama]

Your mileage may vary is alway operative.

 

[saltedplug]

I'm going to buy a new S. Bang but not smoke it in case of a return, but I won't know if there's a problem with flavor until I do??

 

[sasquatch]

I'm going to buy a new S. Bang but not smoke it in case of a return, but I won't know if there's a problem with flavor until I do??

Schrödinger's Bang?

 

[OzPiper]

I'm going to buy a new S. Bang but not smoke it in case of a return, but I won't know if there's a problem with flavor until I do??

Anyone who has bought a Grand Cru Burgundy or 1st Growth Bordeaux, cellared it for 10-20 years, uncorked and decanted only to find it corked or oxidised will know the feeling only too well ??

 

[saltedplug]

Schrödinger's Bang?

Got to admit it, you got me. So I looked it up and the first article I looked at was, in the end, very confusing. And as my post won't be clarified by Schrodinger or Schrodinger Bang, why don't we just say that the topics is deserving of greater study, should I ever understand it well enough to make that determination.

I congratulate you for sniffing out that my post wasn't quite on the up and up. It was left that way as a tease.

 

[lochinvar]

Most people don't believe certain pipes or brands smoke certain tobaccos better than others. I do, and Castello is the brand that is the most skewed in my experience. I currently have 10-12 Castellos, about equal new v. estate and have only had one that smoked Latakia well, a large Sea Rock bulldog and it smokes things like Bengal Slices and Fusiliers Ration exceptionally well. When I have tried Latakia in the others, the flavor goes very sharp and thin. With Virginias, VaPers, VaOrs they give a full, rich flavor.
I have no idea why. Type of briar? Curing? Shape? Coating? A curse from Pan for kicking a goat? It's no big deal for me, I smoke very few Latakia blends anymore, maybe one in twenty smokes or less.

 

[uzzi101]

So I stayed patient, packed a bit tighter and feel the tide has turned. I’m getting much more flavor with each smoke. It’s so strange to me as my other Castello pipes smoke like a dream from day one. Thanks for all the advice.

 

[uzzi101]

As @sasquatch has pointed out elsewhere on this forum, 10 year plus aged briar like Castello uses is a different animal entirely. Even if “load it up and go” works for you on most pipes, that technique will never, ever, get all out of a Castello that a new one has to offer.

This peeked my interest. How do you load a Castello pipe differently from a Savinelli for example or a Dunhill?

 

[sasquatch]

I'm curious too, because I treat Castellos no differently than any other pipe, I put tobacco in them and smoke them, albeit very carefully (as any new pipe) for a few bowls. But I don't know of any secret-handshake type of loading that any particular pipe requires. Do whatever works, like with everything else in pipes.

 

[uzzi101]

If there’s a preferred method for the aged briar I’m all ears.

 

[sasquatch]

Ahh, I asked around, and apparently the tobacco goes in the big hole.

 

[anotherbob]

Ahh, I asked around, and apparently the tobacco goes in the big hole.

they're lying to you it goes in the little hole. The big hole covers the eye.

 

[mso489]

Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens said, humorously I hope, that he always hired a town layabout to smoke his pipes until they were well broken in. This gave the fellow a pipe to smoke and relieved Samuel of the trouble.