Rad Davis briar

[georged]

Price of the pipe and where the briar is from has almost nothing to do with it. A good pipe is a good pipe and good piece of wood is a good piece of wood. The other factor is the maker knowing what to do with it.

Exactly.
The PipeWorld's obsession with finding the Secret Magic Formula to a Reliably Perfect & Wonderful Smoke is a human thing, not a materials or techniques one. (Meaning the never-ending SEARCH is, not the "secret".)
There are simply too many variables in play for anything more than generalities to apply. Clean pipe, good fill/pack technique, etc.
But the fun is in the chase, cuz that's how human minds work.
Once in a while a quality brand pipe is a weird-tasting clunker (I've experienced it only twice), and I imagine that the odds of encountering such a pipe increase somewhat as the price/quality go down, but any "buying rule" more detailed or strict than that is just someone projecting their subjective preferences.

 

[sasquatch]

"There is a man, well known in the pipe community in this country, who advises if I want the best smoking pipe, to stear away from new pipes, and to buy only pipes made with old briar. "
There's no reason, prima facie, why this would be true. Briar is a tree, it grows as it always has - demand for the stuff was probably at a peak in the 50s. If it was ever over-harvested, that would be when.
But the idea that briar is 100s of years old when harvested is wrong, and the idea that people ever cut it and then sat on blocks for 50 years to age them is also wrong. Pipe companies say vague stuff in their press copy like "all our wood is50 years old briar" This is naturally the case: Briar has to be 30 years old or so to be big enough to be worth harvesting, and most of the trees cut are 30-50 years old. This is corroborated by every cutter I've talked to. Older than that, the trees yield to cracking, age, disease, bugs etc.
The stuff grows like weeds in the mediterranean. I asked a guy about briar running short. He laughed in my face and said "Do you run out of dandelions or pebbles or lilacs? Of course not."
I would suggest that the briar being harvested now is as good as ever, and some of it is as good or better than anything you could have gotten in the past - cleaner wood, better cut, better cured. If those old pipes are good it's because they are nice and smooth inside - it's probably DESPITE the 50 cent piece of briar not because of it. Demand for special briar is high now, but demand over-all for briar is nowhere near what it was at the peak of the golden years of pipe smoking - 1920s-1960s. Big houses made half a million pipes a year, and there were dozens of them. Absolutely nothing special about that wood.

 

[georged]

The stuff grows like weeds in the mediterranean. I asked a guy about briar running short. He laughed in my face and said "Do you run out of dandelions or pebbles or lilacs? Of course not."

My favorite response when I asked a briar harvester that question was it's as common as sagebrush is in the western US. Literally everywhere. The default groundcover.
It just occurred to me that much of the erroneous information that pipe smokers have taken to heart and pass along like gospel started out simply as marketing BS.

 

[shaintiques]

I have one Rad. I bought it as an unsmoked estate last year. I wanted one because of his reputation and because he had stopped making them. Not sure if the briar but it is a great smoker. I’d buy another without a thought.

 

[7ach]

I am lucky enough to own 7 of his pipes. All are different sizes and smoke great. Size differences make them each smoke different tobacco better or worse. All of his that I have, are engendered well. I am always on the look out for the next one.

 

[georged]

All of his that I have, are engendered well.

I'm not sure if Rad will be happy to know that, or... disturbed. :lol:

 

[sasquatch]

"It just occurred to me that much of the erroneous information that pipe smokers have taken to heart and pass along like gospel started out simply as marketing BS"
Gotta sell pipes somehow!
It's a mess now. Somebody reads something in a catalog in 1930 and by 1950 the source is forgotten but everyone knows it's true. Even worse, when you do go back to old Sasieni, Dunhill, BBB etc catalogs, some of the stuff you read is hard to assimilate.
Alfred Dunhill writes for a whole chapter about dead root Calabrian briar in about smoke. Ostensibly, every "Bruyere" pipe of the time was a dead root. a) this is nonsense and b) the DR designation didn't exist yet. And yet the core of what Dunhill writes, about Calabrian briar being slow growing, fine of grain, and basically excellent, is true. So was someone blowing smoke up HIS ass (and charging him double for "dead root" briar?). We'll never know at this point.
The Shell patent reads like a story about a guy who had some junky briar he needed to use up somehow. But the core of it is a process that hardened and inured a pipe, no doubt about it. But are we to believe that no Calabrian briar got "shelled"? Was it only, as he states, a means to use up the Algerian junk? Hard to think they would have just thrown away any imperfect (but blastable) Calabrian dead root, now, isn't it?
So at this point we have smokers who could not identify heartwood from sapwood on their briar, but know that any pipe stamped "Algerian Bruyere" will be a good smoker, regardless of maker, stem, anything. We have disingenuous makers who claim that all their briar is dead root (why not?) even though they buy it from the same mill in Spain that I get only "live root" from. We have guys like Rad who make great pipes through diligence and intelligence, and people would frankly rather have magic wood blessed by fairies - that's how seriously we take this experience - we'd as a group rather have an absolutely inane mythos than real understanding - it's more fun this way!
Guys who come to my shop are both treated and disappointed to have to learn to read a block of briar, and anticipate which might make a better sandblast or a better smooth. Brindle stems come from brindle rod. And if you drill a pipe well, and make the stem nice inside, the thing will smoke.

 

[sablebrush52]

I would suggest that the briar being harvested now is as good as ever, and some of it is as good or better than anything you could have gotten in the past - cleaner wood, better cut, better cured. If those old pipes are good it's because they are nice and smooth inside - it's probably DESPITE the 50 cent piece of briar not because of it. Demand for special briar is high now, but demand over-all for briar is nowhere near what it was at the peak of the golden years of pipe smoking - 1920s-1960s. Big houses made half a million pipes a year, and there were dozens of them. Absolutely nothing special about that wood.

Absolute nonsense. Everyone knows that the reason family era Barlings were so superior to any other British pipe was because Barling harvested all their own wood from shrubs that had been growing in Algeria at the time of Napoleon's campaign. All of it. Period. And the reason that they did this is because Nappy gave his troops and their mounts only the finest French wines to drink and when they urinated on the Heath trees it bestowed a special something to the wood that no one has since equaled. But here's another fact of which you are most assuredly unaware. All of Bo Hordh's wood came from this same rare and ancient growth. The Knights Templar arranged the entire business.

 

[georged]

The Bard has spoken.
:clap: :worship: :clap:

 

[sasquatch]

True, I forgot about the connection to the Templars.