I have an interesting experience to share. I got into cigars first, before pipes. When I realized how expensive cigars were, even the cheap ones, I started to really get deep into rolling my own cigars. I actually got pretty good at it, except for getting the draw correct every time. Now that is hard. Staring at a full humidor of well rested and cured cigars that you rolled yourself, and then discovering that half of them are too tight and another half of them are too loose is quite frustrating. Now that takes a lot of experience to get right, something I was not willing to do.
But I ended up having quite a lot of scraps of cigar leaf, so I got the idea to get a pipe and smoke the scrap blends that I mixed up so that I wasn't wasting any tobacco, and saving the cigars for special occasions since they were time-consuming to roll. I got a humble little H.I.S. pipe from a head shop and the cigar leaf was the first tobacco I smoked in a pipe, and I did so for a long time, about a year. Of course, once I tried pipe tobacco, I realized how sub par smoking all the cigar scrap really was.
Here's the strange bit. That pipe little H.I.S. that I smoked so much cigar leaf go seriously ghosted. To this day the only tobacco I can stand smoking out of it are Latakia blends, and I can still taste the cigar leaf l, even past all the lat and orientals. Crazy. And it persisted even after alcohol and salt deep cleaning.
