I usually smoke the same pipe twice per day for a week before changing pipes. I've gone as long as a couple of months with the same pipe and have never had a pipe go sour. I do disassemble and clean after each smoke though.How many bowls of pipe tobacco you have to smoke without resting to make your pipe(briar) sour permanently?
But don’t you need cake to protect the briar pipe from overheating?Never having a sourness problem with a pipe, I have to say I don't know. Similar to ghosting, I think the key factor is maintenance habits and how many pipes you have. If you wipe out the bowl with a paper towel/napkin after you scoop out the ash, you won't build cake, and that will help, and keep the chamber the original size. If you have a dozen or more pipes and rotate them after every smoke or after every day of smoking, that should help. Just like ghosting and funkiness in a pipe, these should prevent sourness.
I suppose it can though I've taken pipes back to bare wood and still had to use alcohol to remove Latakia ghosts.contribute to ghosting
If you smoke dryish tobacco down to the heel, and then give it a hot water flush, towel dry, pipe cleaner in the airway, you can avoid a sour pipe for decades. You can also smoke it immediately after the flush; briar absorbs virtually no water with a quick flush and dry.
3 IIRCHow many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop...? ?
You'll know a pipe is sour when you smoke it and you find yourself wondering if a small animal used the bowl as a toilet for solid wastes. It happens when you don't pack enough pipe cleaners for an extended trip even though you packed a good amount of tobacco.I have no idea what a sour pipe is.
Just clean it after each use. I will sometimes smoke the same pipe 10 times a day, not often, but every now and then, as I can't always bring a dozen pipes with me everywhere I go.