Fifty years of trying to learn more about pikes on my own, have convinced me the very best way is probably one smoke per pipe every 24 hours, but that’s not absolutely necessary.
A fresh tasting pipe is best. You can let the pipe dry out and cool for say thirty minutes to an hour between bowls and it’s going to be fresh all of one day, or maybe several days.
But keep smoking the same pipe, day after day, and it won’t stay fresh.
Besides, it’s fun to swap out pipes.
I use Everclear, because I was taught to, and it evaporates quickly, and there seems to be a solvent effect, and there’s a residual sweet taste from the grain alcohol. But water works, if I don’t have high test booze handy.
What I’ve quit doing is leaving a cake thd thickness of a dime in the chamber. I leave the chamber blackened all the way to the air hole. For certain that holds more tobacco, and I think it might keep the pipe fresher. Carbon absorbs nastiness from the tars, perhaps, and I think the pipe tastes better with a very thin layer of blackened carbon, not a thick one.
Harry Hosterman wasn’t the only pipe smoker I knew growing up.
He was just the one that seemed to enjoy pipe smoking the most.
I still own the Grade A milk barn, more or less unchanged like my father left it in 1971. Sometimes I think I catch a whiff of Harry’s Prince Albert, as I walk over to lift the latch string to the door.
He really should be there, sitting on his haunches, striking a match, lighting his pipe, telling us stories about haints and superstitions and night riders and about how folks lived that had long gone to cemeteries, and other such topics, of life in Spout Spring Hollow.
My Mama and Harry’s wife Wilda Mae ought to bring us out sweet tea and coffee and sugar cookies, too.
But that’s all long gone, so long gone only a few of us remember.