Ideally, a new pipe breaks in effortlessly in a few smokes. I love to see how a new pipe, with her own woody note, evolves into a champ. We've come to consider the speed of the breaking in process a mark of briar quality.
When I asked my tobacconist, the old man who helped me in my beginning stages of smoking, about the difference of a Peterson and a Dunhill, he gave me a completely different judgement of the two brands. The first was less "active". It would interfere less with the smoke. While Dunhills usually mellowed the smoke and took away the edges, it would also smear the nuances and make them harder to detect. The Peterson would give a clearer picture of the tobacco.
The consensus is that a normal Peterson taken many bowls to brak in, unlike a normal Dunhill. The average entry-level Peterson therefore is not as desirable as the average-performing Dunhill. But when we break a pipe in, isn't our hope that the briar works with us, and therefore that it is "active".
While I don't possess a pipe of any of the mentioned brands, my two newest additions show similar behaviours. Ones practically broken in after the first bowl, the smoke is great, but it is extremely hard to detect the nuances that obviously reveal themselves in the other pipe. The other one, however, took 10 bowls to really break in, and I initially had a hard time smoking tobacco that was a tad moister than I usually smoke.
What, after the whole observation, makes a good quality briar? Break-in speed seems to come at the expense of clarity. It seems that every briar has a different measure of "activity". Have you had similar experiences? Do you have pipes that were very easy to break in and provide a clear, nuanced smoke, at least for a genre of blends?
When I asked my tobacconist, the old man who helped me in my beginning stages of smoking, about the difference of a Peterson and a Dunhill, he gave me a completely different judgement of the two brands. The first was less "active". It would interfere less with the smoke. While Dunhills usually mellowed the smoke and took away the edges, it would also smear the nuances and make them harder to detect. The Peterson would give a clearer picture of the tobacco.
The consensus is that a normal Peterson taken many bowls to brak in, unlike a normal Dunhill. The average entry-level Peterson therefore is not as desirable as the average-performing Dunhill. But when we break a pipe in, isn't our hope that the briar works with us, and therefore that it is "active".
While I don't possess a pipe of any of the mentioned brands, my two newest additions show similar behaviours. Ones practically broken in after the first bowl, the smoke is great, but it is extremely hard to detect the nuances that obviously reveal themselves in the other pipe. The other one, however, took 10 bowls to really break in, and I initially had a hard time smoking tobacco that was a tad moister than I usually smoke.
What, after the whole observation, makes a good quality briar? Break-in speed seems to come at the expense of clarity. It seems that every briar has a different measure of "activity". Have you had similar experiences? Do you have pipes that were very easy to break in and provide a clear, nuanced smoke, at least for a genre of blends?
