E-Smokes Revisited

Back in October of last year, I wrote a blog piece about the new subsection of the smoking hobby, the increasing popularity of e-cigs.  To recap, a typical e-cig is something roughly like the diagram to the left - A battery, an atomizer, and some sort of cartridge to hold the flavored liquids that replace tobacco as the "smoke".  There are a thousand varieties of these devices now, and all boast the one great advantage over tobacco in that they produce only moist vapor, not smoke, and are legally enjoyable in non-smoking spaces (Whether the proprietor will allow them is another story, as many locations request e-cig puffers to not "light up" simply because it "looks like smoking"... a damning indictment of the hypocrisy behind the suppression of smoking as a public health hazard).  But these little things are clean, pretty safe, don't leave lingering odors, and can be dropped into a pocket without burning a hole in one's shirt.  While I know many traditionalists will scoff and dismiss them as toys, I don't think they are going away.  My personal opinion is that we are looking at the future of smoking for the iPod generation.

I've had a few of these devices for about a year now.  My small collection consists of a Janty Ego:

... a standard 510 model:

...and a couple of dead DSE-601 e-pipes:

As you can guess by my modifier above, the DSE-601 epipe is trash - Don't waste your money.  It's designed so that the atomizer is a permanent part of the bowl, so that when it fails (Typically within 2 months), the entire bowl section must be replaced at a $40-50 cost.  While I know lots of former cig smokers who love these things and think replacing the bowl every month is no big expense compared to boxes of cigarettes, it is galling to a pipe guy accustomed to buying a pipe and keeping it forever.

The Janty and the 510 have kept on plugging, however.  An aftermarket atomizer has failed while the Janty's original unit soldiers on, and the 510's atomizers continue to work just fine.  If anything, I would say that the budget 510 delivers a superior smoke to the Janty (Better flavor, easier draw), but it isn't made nearly as well, and leaks fluid in rest.

So, what are my observations of e-cigs from a year's use?  They don't replace pipes, but they do have their value.  They excel at portability - If I'm going over to the pipe shop and only have ten minutes to sit and chat, I don't want to bother taking a pipe and having to fool with filling, lighting, etc, when I can stick an e-cig in my shirt pocket with a dropper bottle of my fluid flavor of choice, smoke it as long as I want, and not have hot ashes or mess to contend with.  The downsides?  Well, they are appliances, first and foremost.  I have yet to see an e-smoke device that anyone is going to love like a handmade wood pipe.  It's a very throwaway culture, where the smokers buy the coolest new gadget and use it for a few months and then dump it in favor of a new model with different features.  This is the opposite universe from my world of guys who buy pipes and keep them and use them for forty years.

Also, they're amusingly seasonal, at least for me.  I enjoyed them all through last Fall and then stopped smoking them entirely when winter hit, because the cool metal cylinders just did not provide the warmth in the hand and the full, heavy latakia flavors that I craved on cold winter nights.  I nearly forgot about them, but when springtime rolled around I dug them out again because they're better summer smokers than pipes - There's nothing like sitting on the back porch drinking a root beer and smoking a chocolate/banana flavor blend on a dusky summer evening.  E-cigs excel at sweet tooth flavors and are generally mediocre to lousy at tobacco flavors, at least in my experience so far.  The latakia and perique liquids have little in common with their tobacco counterparts, but where a caramel-waffle-flavored tobacco would make me gag, such a flavor in an e-cig is likely to be delicious.

(Note - Some lawmakers are already stirring up noise over just this sort of flavorful e-cig blend because it "appeals to children".  Never mind the fact that e-cig blends can be enjoyed completely without nicotine, chemicals, or any additives other than food flavorings...  They don't want to see anyone "smoking" because Fuck You, that's why.)

I mentioned in the closing of my last e-cig post that I was considering a Talbert epipe - Now, a year later, I still am.  I've sourced the parts I need and have all the bits on hand to put together test samples, but just haven't had the spare time to work on it.  A number of people have inquired about when I will have some for sale, and the answer is still, "No time soon."  I need to build a few, experiment with them, live with them, and generally get the feel of the mechanics of the things before I'd even consider making anything for sale.  The big issue for me lies in whether it would be possible to marry the charms of a briar pipe with the convenience of an epipe - Only time and experimentation will tell.

Pipes of Interest

For several days now, I've had in my To-Do list the nagging, unchecked reminder that the Pipe Blog is due for a new article (Yes, I now have reminders scheduled into my To Dos, to be sure that the blog is updated regularly and avoid those 6 month long desert periods when I used to forget it existed).  But I've been stumped for a subject.  When a blog about pipes has run for as many years as this one has, one pretty much exhausts the available topics and thinking up posts that aren't rehashes of previous articles is a major challenge.

I grumbled about this in my recent email update notice, and one of the responses I received suggested writing an article about what constitutes a true high grade pipe.  I was prone to dodge this one primarily because this is an undefinable subject and anything that I write is likely to send someone into a blithering rage, but on second thought, I realized something had changed in my outlook over these past 13+ years in the business and I hold an odd opinion here:

I don't care what is or isn't a "high grade" pipe.

What I do care about are interesting pipes, or perhaps I should say Pipes of Interest.  Whether a pipe is interesting to me personally is far more important than whether it is considered a "true" high grade or not, because to be frank, that sort of class division seems a bit silly anyway.  Take it down to the bone, and what you will tend to find with collectors who only want to buy "true" high grades is that they're desperately afraid of ever buying something that might be perceived as lesser, lest this somehow reflect badly on them.  A)  I'm not that insecure, and B) I'm not that much of a snob... and really, we're speaking of snobbery here in unadulterated form.  I've witnessed long debates over whether a high end factory pipe could be considered a "true" high grade or not, and in my opinion this totally misses the real question, which is, "Do you want to buy it and smoke it?"  If you like it and want it, what difference does it make if it's perceived as a "high grade" pipe or not?  (I'm going to wear out this quotation mark key, but I just can't type "true high grade" seriously.... See, there, I did it again.)  And if you don't personally like the pipe, what bearing does its perceived grading status have on anything?

A lot of stuff gets proffered towards this debate - High grades should have handcut stems, they should be from single artisans, they can't be factory pipes, they must be fully handmade, they must be in some exotic shape that's the current de rigeur among collectors...  I could go on and on here but ultimately, I consider this a fruitless attempt to build a "true" high grade checklist that one can refer to in order to be 100% assured that they're buying a genuinely elite pipe and not some "lesser" item.  Personally, I think worrying about where a pipe falls in the Great Pecking Scale is virtually worthless in comparison to whether I actually like it or not.

Lest this just be another, "Buy what you want, smoke what you want" monologue, however, I will say that I do distinguish between pipes in one way - To me, there are Pipes of Interest and everything else.  A PoI, in my opinion, is a pipe & brand that says something to me...  Something that intrigues, excites, and tickles the fancy.  In the glory days of the Dunhill pipe, Dunhills were PoIs because they weren't just a pipe, they were the story of a brave entrepreneur who developed fascinating new techniques in pipe finishing, and who sat at a table in front of his demolished shop after a German bombing run, selling what he could salvage.  For me, PoIs are about the shapes that grab me and the stories that go with them.  Bo Nordh, wheelchair-bound and making pipes still, or Tom Eltang, master of the contrast stain.  Where did the artisan come from?  Does he have a vision?  Has he ever done anything truly original, or does he just crib from others?  Does this brand follow trends or make them?

Does the maker or brand have a story?  If I see a pipe from David Enrique, I know that not only is it a well-designed and clever bit of artistic elegance, but also that it's from the young fellow who apprenticed for years in the French pipe factories, learned the trade moving from job to job, and even traveled as far as Brittany to talk with me about techniques and sandblasting.  He's got a history and a story behind him, and that carries into his work and makes it more interesting to me.  Not so much, I have to say, for the guy who decides he's going to make pipes on weekends and goes online to copy down all the available technical instructions to follow to the letter.  Today there are plenty of pipes on the market using "briar from Mimmo", "only the finest German ebonite rod stock", etc etc, in every version of blowfish you can imagine, and for the most part I just don't care.  Most don't grab me - There's not enough passion and sacrifice in them to make them PoIs for me, regardless of whether they qualify or not on the "true high grade" checklist.

Here's an example - I'm very fond of the clay pipes of Gerard Prugnaud.  High grade collectors might sniff and balk since these are clay pipes with... *gasp* molded stems at affordable prices, but I look at them and know Gerard's lifelong history with clay and his collection of molds a hundred, two hundred years old.  They're not just cheap clays, they're a unique creation of one man born from decades of immersion in the craft and from a history of clay pipemaking that's far beyond a lot of "high grade" briar artisans working today.  This is why a 40 euro bent clay calabash is a PoI for me while the latest damn $900 blowfish from the latest hot new maker is not.  PoIs are all over the price scale - It's not a matter of grain or shininess or how much fossilized Megalodon tooth is used as decor, it's about - for me - the story of the maker behind it...  Who he is, where he came from, and whether his work is unique.

And that's why I don't care so much about what constitutes a "true" high grade or not.

New pipes at Pipe & Pint!

Here's a bit of news - Our local pipes & tobaccos & beer & cigars & wine shop now has their website open and stocked with available pipes.  They even have one of mine, a Talbert ring grain sandblasted freehand from 2007, probably our best year in France (It was a bit odd to see our old "Faite en Bretagne" stamp on one again).  Sharp-eyed folks may notice I've included their logo and a link to their site on our website's home page now, too.

At the moment they are in the process of posting their stock of estate and artisan pipes to the site, so check back with it often as there is new stuff going up.  Also, they're about to have the first new infusion of pipes from our workshop in a long time... Probably since around 2008!  We've finished up ten special Ligne Bretagnes as our re-introduction to their retail shop.  Emily spent considerable time digging through our stock of LBs to find ten stummels, each one a different shape, that were all flawless enough to finish as naturals.  Each one is also fitted with a stem ring handcut from teak decking off of the USS Battleship North Carolina.  I've used this material before (For up-close pics of an example, see here).  Larry, P&P's owner, picked up the material while vacationing at the NC coast and mailed it to me in France some years back, but I haven't had the chance to work with it until now.  It's beautiful material, and between the stem decor and the unstained bowls, these are going to make a special and affordable set of pipes to restart our P&P relations again.  Check out the pics here for samples of a few of them!

The pipes are finished now and I'll be dropping them off at P&P sometime this week, probably Wednesday.  I've talked with Larry about having an afternoon "Meet and Greet" where I would be there to talk to interested folks, and could show off the pipes directly, but we haven't set a date yet.  If you're interested, contact the P&P guys at their website by phone or email!