Olive wood is formidable. You can smoke the same pipe twice a day; but then again I've read that it's fine to smoke briar twice. Olive has a different grain pattern; BriarBlues has a blasted olive wood lovat with the best grain I've ever seen in an olive pipe. For that beautiful of a pipe the price is certainly right. But I don't know much about strawberry. Both the strawberry pipes shown above are fantastic, the first my preference. The lightness is a great attribute, as I clench. But I'm not yet ready to take this plunge. This is my first exposure to it.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbutus_unedo
Arbutus unedo (strawberry tree, occasionally cane apple) is an evergreen shrub or small tree in the family Ericaceae, native to the Mediterranean region and western Europe north to western France and Ireland. .
Taxonomy: Arbutus unedo was one of the many species described by Carl Linnaeus in Volume One of his landmark 1753 work Species Plantarum, giving it the name it still bears today.[1] A study published in 2001 which analyzed ribosomal DNA from Arbutus and related genera found Arbutus to be paraphyletic, and A. unedo to be
closely related to the other Mediterranean Basin species such as A. andrachne and A. canariensis and not to the western North American members of the genus.[2] (Note: no mention of briar, Erica arborea.) Arbutus unedo and A. andrachne hybridise naturally where their ranges overlap; the hybrid has been named Arbutus × andrachnoides (syn. A. × hybrida, or A. andrachne × unedo), inheriting traits of both parent species, though fruits are not usually borne freely, and as a hybrid is unlikely to breed true from seed.
From:
http://pipechat.info/index.php/topic,5080.0.html
From what I can find on the net, strawberry wood is a distant relative to briar.
From what I can tell no one seems to know briar's relationship to strawberry. But given that Becker is using it, its positive characteristics of blast-ability and lightness recommend it. If it is as durable as briar, there is no contest. But I question how wood that is less dense would hold up to the intense heat that the combustion of tobacco generates.
