Absolute Best Knife For Cutting Plugs
- Thread starter hoosierpipeguy
- Start date
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
Site Sponsors
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
PipesMagazine Approved Sponsor
- Status
Love pu'erh and gong fu brewing! Gonna have to chip into an old brick later this evening!My primary hobbies are cooking and Chinese tea brewing, so I use a paring knife which is always sitting by my desk for cutting a plug or breaking into a traditional "cake" of Chinese tea(huge, stone pressed rock hard disks or bricks of tea which you need to chip off with a sharp flat instrument).
The tea looks like this, if you're curious:
puer - Google Search
www.google.com
Since my last post I've actually had the pleasure of wrestling with Curly Block and a few other tough plugs. Feel pretty dumb for suggesting the straight razor... I've since stepped it up to more fitting tools?:
If you want to cut off nice looking coins from something like Curly Block, a straight razor wouldn’t be my choice. But all I have ever tried to do with any plug is to shave off enough to smoke with minimal additional rubbing out to fool with. For that, I used a straight razor for several years, gave it up when I decided I had better things to do than keep the damn thing sharp.
Always nice to meet fellow tea heads. I think there is a lot of crossover when it comes to pipe smoking and drinking of Chinese tea in the traditional brewing method. For anyone reading who is puzzled: The hardcore tea hobbyists even keep their "Tea Cellars" of aging tea(Yup, just like tobacco and wine, Chinese tea drinkers age the teas they collect), borrow from the Cigar folk's 'humidor' and call their containers of tea "pumidors", a portmanteau of Puerh(the name for this specific Chinese tea which is aged) and humidor.
Much like tobacco reviews, tea reviews bear a striking resemblance. There's a comment on the dry leaf(think tin note), then there's the flavor profile, which could be anything from vegetal and earthy to stonefruits and flowers. There's the whole ritualistic element to tea drinking much like with pipe smoking, all the paraphernalia, etc. The drink isn't just something you're having on the side, it's an event where the tea receives your full attention the same way a more diehard pipe smoker would sit and examine a high quality tobacco and the way it changes throughout the bowl(the tea is repeatedly infused and consumed 6-20 times from the same leaves in a small vessel and sipped in small servings). That only scratches the surface, there's many more parallels. Okay, I'm way off topic at this point, I'm done nerding out about tea but I felt the point had to be made.
Results are not that bad... Not the cleanest coins but with a little practice I believe I can get there. I think I really just wanted to give myself an excuse to smoke a few curlies!
- Status