Brief Intermission - Google page

A quick intermission between grading articles! Look to the right, just under the RSS feed links, and you will see a new addition to the page - a Google link. Clicking this will let you easily add this blog to your Google homepage or Google Reader. It should be ideal for those who don't use RSS but would like a quick and simple way to see if there are new posts or not - Check out the screen cap of my example Google homepage here to see what it looks like. Mighty strange to see that Pipe Blog headline there amidst all the (so often depressing) "real" news! And if you're not using Google homepage, I highly recommend it. It's my one-stop shop in the morning for the highlights of every news site that I read. No more hopping through a half dozen news sites for me, a quick scan from one page does it all. Very handy!

Why have Grading? Part 1

Biz Stuff - I've just made some catalog additions. Newly posted are several new Ligne Bretagnes, including the hilariously short & fat Collector grade piece shown to the left. Also posted is a sandblasted Morta Classic, the first of several more which will be posted over the next week. See the News page for full info and details.


Why have grading?

It's a serious question. And it touches on all sorts of issues of the human psyche, and how people buy and why, AND squarely cuts across pricing levels to reveal the different buying "thinking" going on with purchasers of middle-grade and high-grade pipes. I've meant to write about this for a while, and I realized finally that I'd never fit everything I've observed into one article, thus this is the first of..... who knows? A couple, at least. Before I even start on the issues of grading, I want to write a little about these differences in market mentalities as one hops through different price points.

What is the rarest Ligne Bretagne, the grade that has only a few examples in existence in the world (In fact, IIRC, there is only one)? A grade 5. That's the top of the line for the standard-line Ligne Bretagne and sells for a princely 176 €. The one example that I made sat unsold for several weeks, too, due to being such an "expensive" example of its line. It was a magnificent piece of briar, about as perfect as I have seen, with excellent grain. A Talbert Briar of equivalent grain quality would be 750 € or more, and would likely sell almost immediately, yet the grade 5 LB was a slow sell.

What is the rarest Talbert Briar? A grade 5? One of the incredibly-rare M grades? None of the above. The rarest Talbert Briar is the grade 1, of which there is only one example on the earth. This was a smooth Talbert with "so-so" grain (Half beautiful bird's-eye, nearly half bald) that was had for as cheaply as $275. Yet today, I never produce this grade - for all practical purposes the grade 2 is the "standard", entry-level grade. The highest grade Talberts I've made have all been pre-sold - in fact, I have entire lines of standing requests for any new examples of my M grade that might appear.... quite a difference from the poor grade 5 LB! But LB grade 1's fly out the door, yet that grade 1 Talbert Briar sat unsold for nearly six months IIRC.

What lessons can be drawn from these two curiously opposite experiences? At different price points, buyers want different things. The guy looking for a good middle-grade pipe hunts around the $100 mark and has probably never in his life bought a pipe that cost more than $150, ergo that entire market segment will balk at the "extreme" price of the 176 € grade 5 Ligne Bretagne... Yet conversely, buyers of high grade pipes often aren't interested regardless of the exceptional quality of the briar, because it's perceived as a "middle grade" line.

Jump to the Talbert Briar price category and buyers are after something different - They want a high grade pipe in all respects. That means that they don't see the lower price of the entry-grade Talbert as a positive selling point - to them, it's the "bottom end" and not desirable, and they want the grade 4's and Signature pieces. It's an almost complete reverse of the middle-range buying market, and reflects the thinking that, "Heck, if I'm spending 400 € already, I'll splurge a little and get the best I can, rather than save money on the cheaper model".

It occurs to me to wonder if the same carries over into autos - I imagine plenty of Twingos are sold in base model form with no options, but probably damned few Mercedes.

So, having established that sellers must contend with a rather fickle market that goes in different directions at once, in the next post I'll talk about just what grades mean, why they're assigned, and even, yes, question their usefulness! Stay tuned...

Are there really differences in briar?

Biz Stuff - I've just uploaded two new Morta Classics and two new Ligne Bretagne Collectors to the website catalogs, for those who may be interested. There's a green one...
Also, check the News page for info on the further tweaking of the website, including the new estimated dollar pricing in the catalogs.


Today's pic is the pile of stuff I just got in the mail - LOTS of new drill bits, including some experimental ones, plus more bundles of delrin rod. I ordered a few half-round bits to try on airhole drilling - We'll see how they do.

The subject of this post is a topic that arose on a pipe forum I frequent. Are there really differences in the country of origin for briar? Some people will swear by Corsican, or Algerian, or Italian, claiming that these different regions of briar produce superior flavor in pipes. But is this true?

Yes and no.

Before I answer further, consider - No one really knows where their briar comes from. Seriously. Briar mills buy briar burls from all over the place, different countries, different suppliers, and they're all mixed together in cutting and drying. The mill you buy from may be in Italy, but that's no guarantee that their briar is all Italian - It could be from anywhere around the Med. So, anytime someone says that their briar is definitively of this or that origin, take it with a grain of salt.

Past this point, there are two major arguments - Briar is briar versus the contention that briar varies noticeably from source to source. To address that second argument, we've got to first break down just what "good" means in briar. ANY briar source can produce beautifully-grained, excellent smoking wood.... but there are variances. If you want a block that's likely to be less badly flawed in terms of bald spots or cracks, this depends much more on the cutter that one is buying from than on the origin country of the wood.

I've worked with briar from many different sources, and I have the rare ability to be able to actually comparison smoke different briars. To know that both pipes are drilled with the same size of bowl, the same chambers, the same airhole size, and utilize the same stem material.... because ALL of these factors also influence the flavor of the smoke! Smoke the same pipe with an ebonite and an acrylic stem swapped out, and you'll be surprised at the flavor difference. So, already we're looking at an equation that's nearly impossible to boil down to simple measurements - Someone who thinks they like Algerian briar because they believe a brand they like uses Algerian briar may just as easily be responding to the stem design this brand uses, or the airhole layout and size. Too often, big generalizations are made regarding the quality of briar from different countries, often on quite shaky evidence.

But IS there a difference? I can give a very qualified yes. Smoking the same tobacco in identical pipes made from two different briar sources, I can - sometimes - detect a very small flavor difference. In order to notice this difference, I have to actually be smoking the same tobacco in both pipes back-to-back, and on the same night - swapping one with the other every few puffs, because if I smoked them a day apart I would never detect any difference, it is often so minute.

Which of course begs the question - How do I know that the difference between the Greek briar block and the Algerian briar block is down to the source, or rather just the natural variance between two random blocks of briar? I can't. Not all Greek briar smokes the same, nor all Italian. One just has to take what nature deals and make the best of it. If pressed, I have *generally* noticed the following minor characteristics, but they're definitely subtle. Algerian briar, to me, seems to offer a darker, richer, heavier flavor. Greek seems extremely neutral, allowing the tobacco itself to shine. Italian and Corsican seem "bright", giving blends a sharper edge. At least in my experience. But often none of these things are true. It's like that, in nature...