I’m glad you’ve found something you enjoy, but I’m disturbed by your note that you “always get tongue bite” when you smoke a pipe. I’d encourage you to experiment with ways to address that, so that the tea or milk are more enjoyable additions to your smoking routine and not medically necessary.
Depending on what tobacco you’re smoking, you may need to let it air-dry for an hour or so before filling your bowl. Blends that are overly moist can produce tongue bite.
You may be packing too tightly. If you have to draw hard on the stem to keep your smoke going, that will lead to an over-heated bowl and tongue bite. Try packing more loosely until you find the approach that best suits each blend you smoke.
Don’t “puff” your pipe; try slow draws, with pauses in-between. Smoking too fast can produce tongue bite in some blends.
Some blends are almost impossible to smoke without bite due to the manufacturers’ additives. If possible, see if your results are similar with different blends from different manufacturers.
Finally, some of us are extremely sensitive to the chemical composition of certain tobaccos. If a blend has more than the barest touch of perique in it, I can’t comfortably smoke it: It feels like needles piercing my tongue. (For years, I called this “tongue bite,” not realizing what was happening.) Others struggle with bad reactions to burley. To see if you might fall into this camp, try various blends with distinctly different leaf in them: If you normally get bite from a burley blend, try a blend without any burley at all…and so on.
Good luck!
