Further Ruminations on Smoking Quality

[Briar Lee]

I own a half dozen nice meerschaum pipes, a whole lot of cobs, and a couple of clays. I enjoy all of them, there are no bad smoking ones, and when I smoke those I never think wow, this meer or this cob or clay is an outstanding, over the top good smoker. They seem all the same delicious, satisfying smokers, although I think there’s slight differences between meers, and cobs, and clays, as to types of pipes.

I keep one truly bad, awful smoking, malaise era Kaywoodie Magnum to prove truly awful tasting, wet and hot smoking, horrible briar pipes are real. But it’s a unicorn.

The other hundreds of briars are all good smokers, some outrageously good smokers, some better than others smokers, but there are detectable differences in the smoking quality of briars, at least for me.

Sitting here playing with my watches it dawns on me, that a watch is supposed to keep perfect time, and none do (let’s not count atomic clocks).

My quartz watches have an error rate measured in seconds per year, and the others have an error rate measured in seconds per day.

Maybe meers, cobs, and clays have a tiny error rate.

And when we salivate over our favorite briar, that briar is the least bad of our bunch.

Our best briar has the fewest smoking faults.

It’s either that or briar helps out the tobacco, in some way.

Let me fire up some Buoy and ruminate some more on this burning riddle.

 

[tobakenist]

I know you love Algerian Briar, all pipes are good if you know what you are doing, a good tobacco would be great in Cherry wood or many fruitwoods, Bog oak is great, if a pipe is well crafted from anything it would smoke well.

 

[Briar Lee]

I know you love Algerian Briar, all pipes are good if you know what you are doing, a good tobacco would be great in Cherry wood or many fruitwoods, Bog oak is great, if a pipe is well crafted from anything it would smoke well.

More ruminations.

Maybe Algerian briar had to be cured and aged longer, and it is thermally more insulating, so it’s less bad than other briars.

My horrible smoking Kaywoodie Magnum is beautiful pipe, wonderfully made in New York City.

But at the last dying quiver of domestic production a hunk of raw, green, badly cured briar got on the line and it was epoxy finshed and it’s never, ever going to break in.

And in between my horrible Kaywoodie and an Algerian LHS hallmarked 1943 on the silver band, the other briars are breaking in and slowly losing the break in skunk taste.

Or the other side is, maybe briar gets better, and helps out the tobacco, instead of less bad.

Meers and clays do not need cured, and cobs are only seasoned two years to toughen them.

Raw briar, as dug, is unsmokable.

It must be cured, or it never will smoke well.

 

[tobakenist]

I agree with you, Ropp cured Cherry wood, slow curing in ovens at a low temperature for weeks because of the Sap in the wood, they smoke well, I still smoke a couple of mine, great smokers.

 

[LongIslandPiper]

More ruminations.

Maybe Algerian briar had to be cured and aged longer, and it is thermally more insulating, so it’s less bad than other briars.

My horrible smoking Kaywoodie Magnum is beautiful pipe, wonderfully made in New York City.

But at the last dying quiver of domestic production a hunk of raw, green, badly cured briar got on the line and it was epoxy finshed and it’s never, ever going to break in.

And in between my horrible Kaywoodie and an Algerian LHS hallmarked 1943 on the silver band, the other briars are breaking in and slowly losing the break in skunk taste.

Or the other side is, maybe briar gets better, and helps out the tobacco, instead of less bad.

Meers and clays do not need cured, and cobs are only seasoned two years to toughen them.

Raw briar, as dug, is unsmokable.

It must be cured, or it never will smoke well.

I concur with that
Another point to ponder , the care (or lack thereof) for the briar before, during and after a smoke can alter the taste of various tobaccos all within the same pipe. One of the many joys of pipe smoking is the contemplation we all attain enjoying this hobby

 

[Briar Lee]

German bombers were flying over Birmingham England in 1943 when an English worker hallmarked the silver band, on my best of the best smoking Algerian pipes I own. A ship in a convoy with destroyer escorts delivered it to New York harbor where it was delivered to LHS that was blacked out, to guard against offshore U boats using shore lights as navigation aids.

The imported briar used could have been a seedling in between a crack in a rock on top of a windswept mountain in Algeria when Columbus saw a light on the shore. It might have aged in a warehouse twenty years, and it’s aged 80 more.

The first owner smoked it until it’s the same shade of oxblood all over.

Way down at the draft hole, there’s a faint, tiny taste of burning briar.

It’s not perfect yet, not quite.

Why does this matter today?

Castello goes to painful and expensive lengths to use the least bad briar they can make into a pipe.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Call me Ishmael, but I enjoy the taste of burnt briar when breaking in a pipe.

 

[burleybreath]

Call me Ishmael, but I enjoy the taste of burnt briar when breaking in a pipe.

Within reason, of course, and I'm not sure it actually burns, but I get what you're saying. One of the reasons I detest bowl coatings. The synergy or rapport 'twixt wood and tobacco never happens. That might be a good thing, I suppose, if the briar is young wood or otherwise inferior.

 

[Briar Lee]

Call me Ishmael, but I enjoy the taste of burnt briar when breaking in a pipe.

So do I, if it’s “good briar”.

There are nasty tannins in raw, wet briar. All briar must be cured, without exception.

It’s sort of like persimmons.

You know not to eat the green ones.

Then they turn orange. Not all orange persimmons are ripe.

I like the taste of ripe, well cured briar.

 

[sittingbear]

Call me Ishmael, but I enjoy the taste of burnt briar when breaking in a pipe.

That was a disappointingly brief and to the point comment, with a lead-in like that.

 

[sittingbear]

I own a half dozen nice meerschaum pipes, a whole lot of cobs, and a couple of clays. I enjoy all of them, there are no bad smoking ones, and when I smoke those I never think wow, this meer or this cob or clay is an outstanding, over the top good smoker. They seem all the same delicious, satisfying smokers, although I think there’s slight differences between meers, and cobs, and clays, as to types of pipes.

I keep one truly bad, awful smoking, malaise era Kaywoodie Magnum to prove truly awful tasting, wet and hot smoking, horrible briar pipes are real. But it’s a unicorn.

The other hundreds of briars are all good smokers, some outrageously good smokers, some better than others smokers, but there are detectable differences in the smoking quality of briars, at least for me.

Sitting here playing with my watches it dawns on me, that a watch is supposed to keep perfect time, and none do (let’s not count atomic clocks).

My quartz watches have an error rate measured in seconds per year, and the others have an error rate measured in seconds per day.

Maybe meers, cobs, and clays have a tiny error rate.

And when we salivate over our favorite briar, that briar is the least bad of our bunch.

Our best briar has the fewest smoking faults.

It’s either that or briar helps out the tobacco, in some way.

Let me fire up some Buoy and ruminate some more on this burning riddle.

So, are you comparing cobs to atomic clocks? Gawd, don't let Missouri Meerschaum hear that, we'll be paying exponentially higher prices!

 

[Briar Lee]

So, are you comparing cobs to atomic clocks? Gawd, don't let Missouri Meerschaum hear that, we'll be paying exponentially higher prices!

Our fellow Show Me Staters at MM have used hillybilly logic to acquire a virtual monopoly on cob pipes, likely by thinking a meer tastes good and let’s see if this corn cob, can match it.

And the meerschaum pipe itself, is an upscale clay.

The atomic clock, is only extremely close to perfect.

ERROR BEHAVIOR OF ATOMIC CLOCKS ABOARD GPS SATELLITES

Abstract: The signal transmission and position quality obtained by GNSS positioning directly...

www.scielo.br

A briar pipe is sort of like a clam.

The first hungry man to pry open a clam and eat it, was really hungry.

Think of the first man to try a briar pipe.

He had to take the tumor off the root of a shrub, and carve it into a pipe.

And if it hadn’t been cured and seasoned it tasted putrid like my disco era Kaywoodie.

Maybe all good briar pipes are less bad, than they would have been if they were like a raw oyster.