There are a number of things that can ruin a block of briar. Sand holes in the wood, inclusions (where a stone or other particulate has been enveloped into the wood) cracks, insect damage or just plain old holes or voids naturally occurring in the root. Pipe makers find these as they carve pipes, sometimes having to scrap the block after hours of work. Most are salvageable by sandblasting or rustication of the bowl but often the block only has one or two small blemishes to be seen on the surface.

Enter the filler. A kind of putty. What the contents are, I don’t know but it has the appearance of very thick reddish brown paint. Apply with a toothpick to fill the hole and allow to dry. Sand off the excess after it’s dried. Voila. Stain and polish and the blemish is invisible. And yes, they all do it.

The problem is, that to us mortals who buy pipes, these blemishes, called fills, are invisible. That’s the whole point. We aren’t supposed to see them. Eventually, however, we will. Because the filler doesn’t colour up the way the briar does as we smoke our pipes over the years. Finally, the fill becomes visible. Like the one pictured here. A lighter coloured spot in the wood. I don’t need to point it out. If you can’t see it, you’re blind.

Fills do not detract from the smoking experience. They have no effect on the mechanics of smoking. Nor do they affect a pipes flavour. They might annoy the eye, but not the pipe. I have been looking at my humble collection lately through a magnifier and have found a few. Surprisingly, not so many on my older pipes. One or two on some of my newer acquisitions. The one pictured here is on an old horn, made around 1920. So this is not a new invention by pipe makers. It’s an old tradition.

I’ve decided to ask both my pipe suppliers to make a point of laying the flawless pipes they produce to one side. I’m thinking of starting a new line…..

Flawless.

Basically, it follows the lines of a prince but the boxwood section on the shank and the reduced, almost saddle, stem makes this one stand out a bit in my otherwise overfilled racks. The boxwood is separated from the briar with a decorative vinyl ring and the stem bears a silver ring to delineate the shift from shank to stem. The pipe is bored for a filter, which I duly removed and inserted a plug to fill the expanded airway.
I suppose I would have to declare this one as having more flame grain than anything else but that does not detract in any way from my pleasure as I look upon this lovely pipe.

Stanwell or not, this one was produced at the new factory in Italy. Many have been a bit suspicious of “Danish” pipes being made in Italy, raising suspicions about quality and form and the engineering that we are used to from Stanwell. Rest assured, this one sticks to the rigid demands to which we are accustomed. The airway is open and the draw is easy. The general finish is as good as it gets and the pipe, despite being a tad heavy in the mouth, is comfortable to smoke. It is not one for the clenchers out there. It does, however, sit very comfortably in the hand and I enjoy the smoking of it. The stampings on this particular piece are very crisp and the silver Stanwell  “S” logo is well placed on the stem. The pipe is marked “Stanwell” over “Danish Design” over “XMAS 2011”.

Had I got this in my Christmas stocking, I would have been well pleased.

Dimensions:

Bowl: 50 mm diameter and 46 mm high.
Chamber: Ø 30 mm and 34 mm deep.
Total length: 105 mm.
The button is 18 mm wide and 7.5 mm thick.

The Georg Jensen I know of was not a pipemaker. He was a designer. Designing everything from chinaware to decorative gold and silverware, furniture and lord only knows what else. It might be an idea, to try to find out who made this pipe. As it was made for a championship, there must have been quite a few made, which would probably involve some kind of industrial production. That limits the field slightly but still leaves a dearth of options. I may have to research this. I just piqued my own interest.

But I digress. The old pipe is a very good smoker. It delivers every time I light it and it does not appear to be fussy about what I offer it. It smokes both Virginas and latakia blends with equally good results, doesn’t ghost easily and has always been a sweet pipe. It has never soured, despite my abuse of it. As I said, it isn’t the prettiest piece of briar I own but it is surprisingly dependable. There is a smidgeon of cross grain on the front of the bowl but nothing to get excited about. It does have a general pleasant appearance though, being from a bygone era where billiards were stylishly longer than high. The stem is exactly half the length of the pipe. Easy draw, lightweight and comfortable, I suppose that’s why I hang to this old warrior. In fact. I wouldn’t be without him.

Markings: “Georg Jensen Pipes”. “Made in Denmark”. “SSM 87”. And here’s the one I wonder about, “Goodwill”. Which has me thinking of Kriswill as a possible maker.

Dimensions: Length: 157 mm. Height: 50 mm. Bowl Ø: 36 mm at the maximum. Chamber: Ø 19 mm x 41 mm deep.

So how about you, dear readers. Do you have a pipe that that can take it the way Old George does? Let me know.

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Update..
…and the mystery is solved. Thanks to some hard work by one of my readers..
The pipe maker is a Per Georg Jensen. Now working for MacBaren tobacco. I clipped this from the MacBaren website and I hope they will forgive me for this:

Throughout my adult life I have been among pipe smokers – the first 23 years as a pipe maker with Georg Jensen Pipes and the last 4 years as ”Tobacco Professor” at Mac Baren.

So, there he is.

As I was about to leave Benner asked me to wait for a second, he had something for me. Off he went to wherever it is he hides the good stuff and came back with a pipe sock in his hand.

“This is the ugliest pipe Karl Erik Ottendahl ever made.” He said. “It lacks style, form, grain and shape. It’s so ugly that I won’t sell it and at the same time, I don’t want to keep it. You might think it’s a great pipe. I don’t. It’s yours if you want it. Smoke it. Don’t sell it.”

Benner and Karl Erik were great friends and colleagues. This meant something to him. Benner knows I like large pipes. I think he believed he’d found a good home for it, and hence, “Smoke it, don’t sell it.”

Well, I said, Thanks Benner. I’ll take it and give it a try.

I smoked it today. He’s absolutely right about the pipe. Looking at it, it isn’t pretty. It’s a clump of a pipe. Big bowl, off centre and the shank is out of line. Not only that, the shank is not even. It has a bulge on one side close to the bowl and is curved inward by degrees on  the other side. The mouthpiece is also out of whack, both horizontally and vertically. The shank does not meet the bowl evenly on both sides. The bowl is not round. Even the conical relief on the stem is uneven and out of line with centre.  Aesthetically speaking, this one is a disaster. The grain is hopeless too. There is very little. In fact, it has a rather large and unsightly blob of a knot on the right hand bottom of the bowl which counterbalances what might be straight grain on the left.

There is a little redeeming birds eye on the rim, but that’s it.

It is heavy, out of balance and surprisingly comfortable to hold.

Whoops. I just praised the pipe. It is surprisingly comfortable to hold.

As I left Benner he said something else. “You never know” he said, “it may turn out to be the best smoker you have.”

You know what? He may be right. The airway is perfect even though this pipe is bored for a filter. I threw the filter away. I can’t stand ‘em. The internal engineering is absolutely on the money. The pipe smokes perfectly and easily. No tugging on this one. Smoke simply flows through it. Delightful.
This pipe has finally come home. I’ll never part with it.

Which brought me to this revelation in my pipesmoking; a good pipe is no more than the airway it surrounds. Shove the aesthetics aside for a moment. If the airway is good, if the engineering is as it should be, everything else is just for the eye. Had I been blind, I would have smoked this pipe without ever finding fault. The casing around the airway is secondary to the function of smoking the pipe.

The best smoker I have? I don’t know. But it’s going to be one of the best. Of that, I’m sure.

Markings are a little unusual for a Karl Erik. He stamped it with his surname. “Ottendahl”.
“Handmade in Denmark” with a model number(?), “3”. The stem bears the “O” logo and not the more known and recognisable  “KE”.

The pipe is a crooked 150 mm long, the bowl is 60 mm high. The chamber is Ø21 mm and is 43 mm deep. The airway is 4 mm in the shank.

It may be an ugly duckling, but I already love this pipe. It has a great future ahead of it.

The plants took off about two months ago after lying still in the garden for four weeks or so. Suddenly they started to go up, and out. Taking the advice that I could find on internet forums, I have been harvesting leaves as they yellow on the stalk. The leaves get hung on strings in my woodshed and they die slowly and turn a rich golden brown colour. This is known as “colour curing” and is necessary unless one wants to smoke green leaf, which isn’t particularly attractive either to the eye or the palate. I have invented a system that allows me to add leaves to my strings at one end and remove finished leaves at the other. Henry Ford would be proud of me. The leaves are heavy when picked but dry out to be extremely light. Some of that weight will be put back as curing goes on as I need to rehydrate the leaves later, but that’s another story. As my leaves dry, I store them in a cardboard box where they will wait for further treatment. One can decide to simply leave them hanging where they are and they will naturally air cure over about six months to a year. I can’t wait that long so I decided to attempt fermenting my leaves.

There are several ways to achieve fermentation. The simplest is to stack the leaves in piles and monitor the internal temperature of the pile. A natural fermentation will generate heat and when the centre of the pile reaches 50° one simply opens the pile and rearranges the leaves. Fermenting tobacco releases unwanted substances and will generate a smell of ammonia. Once that smell is gone, the tobacco is ready for aging or storage. This process requires constant monitoring and a lot of work. Not really my cup of tea. If you screw it up, you get compost.

I decided to build a fermenting cabinet. One needs a container large enough to hang tobacco bundles in, a heat source, humidity and circulation. I considered building a cabinet out of wood and styrofoam. I had made plans and drawings. I consulted with other growers. And then a miracle happened. Our old refrigerator broke down. I now have the perfect container for my fermenter and my dear lady has a new fridge. Everyone’s happy.

My set up is simple, because I’m not a genius and I hate complication. Keeping it simple has always been my motto.
So.. I ran an electric lead into the fridge through the condensation outlet, so I didn’t need to get too technical with the tools. I hooked up a light bulb and an old computer fan to the lead and plugged it into the wall. Hey presto, light, heat and circulation. Humidity is supplied by an old paint tray filled with water. That gives me a large surface area of water to evaporate and it provides the exact 75% humidity I need to ferment. Luckily, I get the right temperature from the light bulb too. Had it been too high, a weaker bulb would have done the job, too little and a stronger one would have had to be inserted.
I found an old tubular curtain rod and cut it to length so that it fits across the top shelf supports in the fridge. My tobacco gets hung, in tied bunches, on that.

I hung a thermometer in the fridge together with an old hygrometer from a humidor. That gives me a method of controlling the heat and humidity inside the cabinet.

I fitted a locking latch to the door to keep it firmly closed and, finally, I drilled a couple of holes in the sides of the cabinet to allow air in at the bottom and out at the top. Air comes in at the bottom left and out at the top right.  Heat rises, as does the water vapour and it appears to work as I want it to. I can see steam leaving the outlet holes in the evening. The fan provides circulation inside the box.

I paid pennies for the whole set up.  Cheapest thing I ever built.

All I need to do, is top up the water tray in the evening and check the tobacco for mould. If that appears, then I’ll stop the process, dry the tobacco again, brush off the dead mould and then restart the fermentation process. Apparently, that’s OK and is not detrimental to either the tobacco or me.

My first tobacco will be ready in about two weeks. Then I’ll have to figure out how to store it and age it. The best of it all is, that it will be smokeable from that point on.

I can’t wait to try it!

Back in March this year we all got together for the Danish national championships in slow pipe smoking. I was a bit worried about the pipe. Stanwell normally provide the instrument but since they moved their production to Italy, I haven’t seen many new Stanwells in the shops around here.
I needn’t have worried.

The pipe we used was this smooth finished canadian, produced in Italy and designed by Stanwell. The fact that it is smooth is a bit of a revelation. We are used to getting sandblasted models for these championships. I hope the trend continues. It’s not that I don’t like sandblasted pipes but I do prefer to see a little grain in the woodwork. The shank on this pipe is a full 60 mm long and oval in section and the stem is 45 mm. Which makes for a pretty stylish pipe, considering the full length of this thing is 140 mm. The engineering is spot on. Or at least, it is on my pipe. I don’t know how the other 200 examples measure up but I haven’t heard any complaints! It smokes well too. I prefer filling it with Virginia but one of my friends says it smokes very well with flake tobacco too.  He should know, he’s been smoking a pipe for about fifty years.
Generally speaking, if this is what we can expect from future Stanwells, then nothing has been lost by moving the production to more southern climes.
Typically, this pipe was “presmoked”, which means it had the black waterglass and carbon mix painted into the bowl. I have never been bothered by this but it can impart a bitter taste to the first smoke. I don’t remember being bothered by this during the competition either, but I would like to try a natural finish in the bowl just to see if it would or could make a difference to the competition.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with this pipe. It looks the part, smokes well, the engineering is good and I enjoy smoking it. When all is said and done, that’s all that is important.

Specs:

Length: 145 mm
Bowl diameter: 35mm at the widest point.
Bowl height: 44 mm
Chamber: Ø19 mm and 37 mm deep.

Markings:

“DM2011” over “Stanwell” over “Danish Design”. The stem bears the silver “S” logo.

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Footnote: I have one of these, new, unsmoked, tucked away for sale later. The box, sleeve and the dowel tamper that came with it at the competition follow the pipe. If anyone is interested in getting it before it goes onto the sales site later this year, drop me a line.

This particular pipe came to me via the World Championships held in Portugal in 2010. I haven’t really smoked it that much since then but recently I have pulled it from the rack and have enjoyed a few bowls of Virginia in it. It is turning out to be a very good pipe. It burns evenly, generally to the bottom of the bowl and the engineering appears to be as good as it gets. The draw is free and airway open. An easy pipe to smoke. If this is typical of Vauen, then I may just have to own a few more.
The bowl is not as attractive as it might be, being devoid of anything resembling grain except for a small flash of flame on the left side, but like books, you can’t judge a pipe by its cover.  And bear in mind, this is a mass produced pipe and not exactly an artisan piece.  Despite all that, it is still a good smoker.
The pipe is decorated by what appears to be a boxwood ring and the bowl has a varnish-like finish. There is a model number stamped into the underside of the shank, “3188”.  Apart from this, “Vauen” is stamped into the port side of the shank and “World Championships” over “Portugal 2010” on the starboard.

Dimensions:

Length: 145 mm
Bowl: 48 mm high and Ø38 mm
Chamber: Ø20 mm and 39 mm deep.
Airway: 4 mm.

Nothing gives me greater pleasure at the moment than going round the patches, pipe in the mouth, weeding round and tending to these little beauties. If nothing else, I’ve learned that the garden can be a relaxing place to be!

Here’s a few snapshots of a couple of my babies. Lookin’ good, eh? Virginia on the left, Orinoco on the right.

Now that it’s all up to nature and the weather, I promise to get back to the core business of this blog. I do have a couple of new pipes I want to tell you all about.

At least, I hope not. Why? Because I’m honoured to add another pipemaker to my sales site. I’ve got Benner to agree to letting me sell some of his pipes.  And very nice they are too. Now, I would have published a picture of Benner here but he, being a modest sort of guy, is camera shy. So here’s a few of his pipes instead.

Enjoy.

What really gets my craw up, is the obscene taxation that our oh-so new religious, anti-everything-enjoyable government is forcing upon me in order to “regulate” my behaviour. I’ve had enough. The time has come to revolt. To deny them their pornographically high extraction of my hard earned cash. I hereby declare my independence of their tobacco taxes. Or at least, the beginnings of that revolt.

I have a garden. Little but doubtless productive, I have decided to dig in the earth and prepare it for war. Not by digging trenches. Oh no. I’m planting tobacco. I’m gonna grow my own. Tax-free and legal. And no-one’s gonna stop me.

I’ve sent off for seeds, been to the gardening centre and bought all the necessary paraphernalia to get my seeds going and now I am waiting for the ground to thaw. While I’m waiting, I can get my seeds sprouting and will have time to prepare for the coming agricultural adventure. Obviously, all the hard work starts when I can get digging but until then, I have a lot to learn. My father was the gardener. Not me. So the learning curve will be long and steep. I then have to learn about drying, curing and storage of the expected harvest. One can’t really just pick a leaf, cut it up and smoke it. There are many processes involved after the growing is done before one actually gets to enjoy the weed.

There are places I can go to read all the information necessary. I have joined an internet forum to help me get started. I am not alone with this. I am making contact with other home-growers and a few professionals. I won’t say success is guaranteed, but it is achievable.

The first blow has been struck. I have planted my seeds today and await their germination in about five to ten days time. Six weeks from now and they will be transplantable and will probably go into pots for a hardening period. By then, the weather should have improved enough to start serious planting.

I’ll be back on this topic later. Wish me luck.