If you are the kind of person who smokes a cigarette in forty-five seconds on a street corner between meetings, the pipe will frustrate you enormously. Good. That frustration is the pipe teaching you something about yourself.
Choosing Your First Pipe
Begin with something modest. The Missouri Meerschaum corncob pipe is not a beginner's compromise — it is, genuinely, one of the finest smoking instruments available. Mark Twain smoked one. Einstein smoked one. The corncob smokes cool and sweet from the very first bowl because it requires no break-in period; the porous cob absorbs moisture naturally without the sourness a new briar can produce.
If you prefer a briar from the outset — and there is nothing wrong with that preference — choose a straight billiard from a reputable maker. Savinelli, Peterson, and Stanwell all produce reliable, well-made entry-level briars in the $50–100 range. Avoid novelty shapes and carved pipes; they are harder to pack and clean, and your technique will suffer for the extra difficulty.
Do not begin with a meerschaum. They are porous in a way that rewards experienced technique, and they are fragile. Wait until you know how you hold a pipe before you hold an expensive one.
Choosing Your First Tobacco
This question separates the advisers. My recommendation is an aromatic blend for the first month — specifically Cornell & Diehl's Autumn Evening or McClelland's Winter Time if you can find it. Aromatics are forgiving: they stay moist enough to pack without instruction, they smell pleasant to non-smokers sharing your space, and they are unlikely to produce the bite that drives beginners away from the craft entirely.
After a month with an aromatic, try a Virginia flake. Samuel Gawith's Full Virginia Flake or Orlik's Golden Sliced will show you what tobacco tastes like when it is not cased or topped with flavourings. You may find you prefer aromatics. You may find the Virginia opens something new. Most serious pipe smokers end up in the Virginia camp eventually, but there is no shame in enjoying either.
Avoid heavy Latakia blends until you have smoked for at least three months. They are wonderful — campfire-smoky and complex — but they are an acquired taste, and a bad first experience with Latakia can put people off a category of tobacco they would otherwise love.
Packing
Pack a pipe in three stages, and only press as firmly as required to make the tobacco draw freely.
Stage one: Fill the bowl loosely to the top, then press the tobacco down to roughly half the bowl's depth with your thumb. The draw should feel like sucking air through a slightly open window.
Stage two: Fill the bowl loosely again, to the top. Press down to about three-quarters full. The draw should feel slightly more resistant — still comfortable.
Stage three: Fill to the top once more. Press gently. The finished level should be within a few millimetres of the rim. The draw should have a gentle resistance to it — not a complete block, but not open air either.
If in doubt, pack slightly loose rather than tight. A loose pack can always be tamped as you smoke; a packed-too-tight pipe is only cured by emptying it.
Lighting
Use two lights: a charring light and a true light.
For the charring light, hold the flame just above the surface of the tobacco and draw in slowly while moving the flame in a circular pattern across the bowl. The tobacco will rise and char slightly. Allow it to go out completely.
With your thumb or tamper, gently press the charred surface flat. Then apply your true light with the same circular motion, drawing steadily and gently until the tobacco glows evenly across the bowl.
Use wooden matches or a pipe lighter with a soft, angled flame. Avoid disposable lighters — the butane imparts a detectable flavour, particularly on fine Virginias. Cedar spills, lit from a candle, are traditional and add a pleasant note of their own.
The Smoke Itself
Smoke slowly. Slowly. More slowly than you think necessary.
The ideal cadence is one draw every fifteen to thirty seconds. Yes, that slowly. The pipe will go out if you are not careful — this is normal, expected, and not a failure. Relighting a pipe is part of the experience. You may light a bowl four or five times before it is smoked through.
Hold the smoke in your mouth, not your throat. Pipe tobacco is not inhaled (or should not be; the nicotine is absorbed through the mucous membranes without inhalation, which is one reason pipe smokers historically reported lower rates of certain smoking-related conditions than cigarette smokers). If you are inhaling and feeling dizzy or unwell, stop immediately and breathe normally. The nicotine in some pipe tobaccos — Virginia flakes in particular — is substantial.
Cleaning
Clean your pipe after every bowl. Pass a pipe cleaner through the stem before you smoke, and another through the stem and shank after the bowl has cooled.
A deeper clean — the salt-and-alcohol cake method — is worth doing every twenty bowls or so. Soak the shank and stem in rubbing alcohol for an hour, then plug the shank, fill the bowl with kosher salt, and add a few drops of alcohol. Leave overnight. Rinse in the morning. Your pipe will smoke like new.
Do not smoke the same pipe twice in one day. The wood needs to rest and dry between smokes. If you smoke frequently, collect two or three pipes and rotate them.
Patience, Again
The pipe will not be comfortable for the first three or four months. Your technique will be clumsy, you will get tongue bite, you will pack wrong, you will smoke too fast, you will burn your thumb with the tamper. This is the apprenticeship. Every experienced pipe smoker remembers it.
But one evening you will sit down with a properly packed bowl of a Virginia flake you've come to know, and you will light it correctly, and it will draw perfectly, and you will smoke it to the heel without relighting once, and you will understand, for the first time, what the pipe is for.
Be patient. The pipe has been waiting.
Questions about getting started? Write to us at contact@faridunhill.com — our head tobacconist answers every letter personally.