beebiz":lizrd9ni said:
I'm glad that it is not just me!!
Its definitely not just you, Robert. But, you WILL face some stare-downs from those who insist that a pipe is nothing but a furnace for burning tobacco.
Things come down to three issues, I think. First, there's the wood. A badly cured piece of briar may, in time, "break in" and become a decent, or even a great tasting pipe. Or, it might not. I've had pipes that didn't come round even after a hundred bowls were smoked, and all sorts of "tricks" had been applied. Bad tasting briar is just bad tasting briar. (I think it possible that at least some of the bad taste comes from the shank, in which case all the cake in the world, and all the fancy bowl coatings people dream up won't do a thing to improve the taste. But, that's the kind of "research" that isn't at all pleasant, so who really
wants to explore it?)
Distantly second is construction. (Get those eyebrows back down, guys.) I've had plenty of pipes that were challenging smokers, but that tasted wonderful. In some cases, I've worked on the internals to good effect, improving the smoking dynamics to the point where they are easy smokers, but in other cases, the pipes have tasted SO good, that I wouldn't dream of messing about with them. At all. If it ain't broke...
Internals are important, but if you've got bad tasting briar, all the "engineering" in the world isn't going to make the pipe taste good. On the other hand, a badly drilled pipe can usually be fixed, if you're willing to spend the time to do it yourself, or the money to have someone else do it. So, the construction, to me, is important, but not nearly as much so as the briar. Fortunately, most reputable pipe makers try to use the best briar they can find, so the Bad Briar Syndrome probably isn't as common as it was when millions of pipes were being made every year. (Much of the "break-in" mythos probably evolved from days when the majority of inexpensive pipes were made, out of necessity, from briar that wasn't cured very long, or very well, simply because of the volumes that had to flow out of the factories. Maybe we're actually fortunate, in this regard, that pipe smoking
isn't as popular as it was in the 1940s.)
The factor that we too often ignore is expectation. Given that a pipe is at least a good one, if we are
anticipating a great smoke, we are probably more likely to get one. It's one of those odd principles of pleasure. Even blind tasting wine-experts enjoy what they drink more when they know what it is, and can have the benefit of the expectation to set them up for the experience. (Of course, there are also those who are simply contrarian, and will begin searching for flaws when they expect something good to be coming. Kind of sad, really, but it happens too often.) Psychologist Paul Bloom discusses some of this in his recent book,
How Pleasure Works. (It's not nearly as dry as it sounds - kind of a fun read, really.)
Every pipe is different. Even how a pipe feels in the hand, or between the teeth can influence our enjoyment of it.
The pipe is part of a complex system, and that system can easily be over-analyzed without yielding much objective information. The cliché, "Smoke what you like, and like what you smoke," holds true. It's fun, at least for some of us, to think about what's going on under the bonnet, but it's the driving quickly along winding roads that delivers the most pleasure.
