Thoughts on Tongue Bite.

[ThermionicScott]

At the risk of sounding like a contrarian... I find that when a blend is bitey to me, a wider bowl tends to cool it down. I think two reasons, first the wider bowl adds more air to the mix, since I do not let the cherry burn all the way across the chamber. And, secondly it makes more smoke enter the draft, and maybe cools the smoke en masse. Instead of a focused narrow stream, and more billowy... eh... that sounds stupid. I don't have an explanation. But, I do know that if I smoke Virginia #1 in my regular tall conical Virginia pipes, it burns like hellfire. But, if I smoke it in a larger wider pipe, it doesn't burn as badly. I will just be damn glad when I have smoked all of my Virginia #1.

So far, one of the best explanations I've heard is that with a wider bowl, the velocity of the air moving through the bowl is lower than that through a narrower bowl, for the same draw. We all know that sucking too hard heats up the ember and encourages bite, maybe a wider bowl helps prevent that.

 

[midwestpipesmoker70]

Personally, I have found that the roof of my mouth and tongue get irritated when I am smoking too fast or with too many re-lights trying to finish the end of the bowl. I have always equated it to heat, especially when trying to hard to finish every piece of tobacco to the end. Tongue leather is the condition you find yourself in after a weekend pipe show haha.

 

[LeafErikson]

I sincerely hope you're either trolling or just started smoking a pipe last week. There is no way you actually believe this my man.

 

[Deano]

 

[ADKPiper]

I've never associated tongue bite with burley. I've found that Virginia is the culprit. I've been told that the high sugar content causes it to burn hotter. My real world experience is that if I don't smoke too much Virginia based blends I have no issue with the inverse being equally true.

 

[Sobrbiker]

The point I believe Briar Lee was making wasn’t the size of the bowl, but the serving size of burnable material. When pipers burn a bowl, there’s a gram or 3 in the bowl. When us stoners burn a bowl, there’s a quarter of a gram. I went a step further and posited that a smaller bowl would be handy for smoking smaller amounts of baccy at a time.

Plus, pot smokers inhale directly into lungs, not the closed space of the mouth.
I’ll continue to believe it’s chemical, both in the blend and pH of any given mouth at any time. I can smoke some blends like a chimney with impunity, others I’m fried at a partial bowl for a while. I don’t think the lighting or ember temp is significantly different…

 

[HawkeyeLinus]

“Listen” to your mouth!

I had a few more bowls than normal yesterday playing bachelor with the dogs.

Could sense it this morning but a bowl of really good Va and coffee called to me. I could tell almost immediately after my first sip of hot coffee the front part of my tongue wasn’t very happy. Part of it was puffing through a bowl of a not dried aro yesterday afternoon while concentrating more on garden research.

So, I’m finishing it right now, but will call it good for a few days.

Having said that I’ll probably grab a Plip later, haha.

 

[metalheadycigarguy]

My thoughts on Tongue Bite... it sucks!
I get tongue bite when I haven't smoked a pipe in a while; usually because I get in cigar mode and smoke my cigars for a period of time, and when I come back to a pipe, I get bit. This is usually because I smoke my pipe to fast, or re-light my pipe multiple times because I didn't let the tobacco dry enough. I notice it more with Virginia blends over anything else. I find that a nice cold/ice coffee soothes my tongue limiting the amount of tongue bite.

 

[fishmansf]

Guys. I've seen a lot of talk about tongue bite being caused by the pH of the tobacco, or the pH of the smoker's mouth. It's nonsense. There is no tobacco acidic or alkaline enough to cause necrosis. Burley is notorious for having the worst tongue bite, and its pH is neutral. There are foods with pH more extreme than any tobacco, but they don't cause tongue bite.

Look at this article: Nicotine stomatitis | DermNet - https://dermnetnz.org/topics/nicotine-stomatitis

Smoker's keratosis is a medical condition caused by extreme heat in the mouth. According to one study, about 60% of pipe smokers have smoker's keratosis. See where I'm going with this?

Smoke is made up of tiny particles. Tongue bite is caused by extremely hot smoke particles entering your mouth. Burley most likely has worse tongue bite because it burns at a higher temperature. Charcoal filters decrease tongue bite because they filter out larger particles from the smoke; large particles have more mass and transfer more heat to your mouth resulting in a burning sensation, while the smaller particles cool quickly enough not to burn you. Churchwardens tend to help with tongue bite because they allow the smoke to cool; smoke particles are so small that their temperature changes drastically in milliseconds, and every inch of stem the smoke travels down will reduce the temperature of the smoke particles, leaving only the largest particles with enough heat to burn you.

So, that's it. Mystery solved. We can all stop reading tea leaves and consulting the stars to give us the answer to this ineffable mystery. The next time I read some garbage about pH causing tongue bite, I'm going to reach through my computer screen and strangle the idiot who wrote it.

Not advisable. Nor is the person who writes that impaired. I took the word De-mystifying out of your title.

It could also be as simple as.... wait for it... pulling literal smoke from a burning ember 2" from your face into your mouth ... You'd burn your mouth from doing that to a bonfire too.