The overwhelming majority of meerschaum pipes perform well, regardless of whatever blend you choose to smoke in them. Indeed, this has been one of the big attractions of these white pipes for me. I can avoid having to dedicate pipes to blends, except for some blends like St Bruno Flake, which will ghost any pipe. Keeping the pipe clean is all that needs to be done to enjoy the clarity of smoking experience they provide and be able to smoke nearly any blend, without a concern for ghosting. This is the general experience for the greater number of meerschaums that you will encounter over a lifetime. This essay is about the rare, finicky pipe that calls to you, like the sirens did to Odysseus. These are the ones that smoke all but the one paradise blend with underwhelming results. Whether it is the result of an association the block used to carve the pipe formed with the clay it was mined from, or the curse of some pipe muse, this will be the most demanding pipe you will encounter. The odds are that you may never encounter one of these pipes, but if you do, then this article will serve you with good counsel. It is a quest that demands patience and firm resolve, beyond that of most Pipemen. The rewards of the successful quest are a smoke of such character and pleasures that words to describe it simply do not exist.
The first time I saw this pipe in auction, there was no amount of will power that I could summon to resist the desire to acquire it. The Koncak Meerschaum trademark logo has been an indication of quality in materials and craftsmanship that is found only and infrequently in the vintage and estate pipe market these days. The Koncak dynasty of carvers, which also employed some of the better carvers of the day in their workshop, made and sold pipes to target populations from the frugal to the extravagant. It is wise to elicit any information that the seller can provide, but typically little is known by sellers today about the pipe and its provenance. This Smooth Pot with 925 Silver Faux Spigot is one of the better pipes that I’ve seen that the Koncaks produced. Ephraim and Sedat Koncak infrequently signed their work, while Battal and others who carved for the Koncaks frequently did sign their work. This pipe isn’t signed. Fortunately, I was able to win this pipe, as the sole bidder, which surprised me, as I thought it would attract a lot of attention. Later, others who complimented me on this acquisition admitted that they saw the auction but did not bid because they thought the bidding would go too high for them. Sometimes you just get lucky.
In a few days, when the postman delivered it, I began to clean it up. It had not been smoked a great deal, which surprised me, considering that it is a quality pipe and meant to provide decades of service. I wasn’t going to complain. The pipe has been carved from heavy, dense block, which is typically what intricately carved pipes are made from. Likely, this choice was made by the carver to give firm foundation to the silver collar on the shank and provide durability for the wet smoker. The patina that age brings meerschaum is something that I find attractive in a pipe, so just a light wipe down with Everclear easily removed the surface grime. Polishing up the bit and the silver collars on the bit and shank was easy work as well. There was a moderate bit of cake in the chamber and it looked like the pipe had never been smoked to the bottom of the chamber. Again, I wasn’t going to complain. There was no indication that any cheap aromatic had been smoked in it, which gave me reason to be grateful. After replacing the delrin push/pull connector, and giving it a good scrubbing with Everclear, I let the pipe rest overnight to dry from the cleaning. The next day, after smoking the first pipe of the day, to get started, I loaded this pipe with 1776 Tavern blend. My habit is to smoke estate pipes with heavy English blends, until they start smoking with clarity, mostly because they will mask most ghosts and residuals of past fires, while I flush the pipe. Curiously, this pipe lent a musky aftertaste to the smoke, which I reasoned was because the pipe had never been smoked to the bottom of the bowl. By the tenth or twelfth bowl, I found that this musky taste was still in the smoke, when I would have expected it to be smoking with clarity. My theory about this taste being easily purged from this pipe had been overly optimistic. What did I know anyway? I smoked another half dozen bowls, using Hal O’ the Wynd this time, reasoning that the hotter burning blend would exorcise this musky character in the smoke. Then I tried a succession of blends from Burley, Orientals, Balkans and Scottish mixtures, with no success of purging the pipe of this ghost. By this time, I began to understand why the pipe had not been smoked to the bottom of the bowl before. It had to be the musky flavor. The experience had become frustrating and my determination began to falter.
The pipe sat in its case for a couple of weeks before I became interested enough to resume my purge of the pipe. Frankly, I was a bit put off with my lack of success in exorcising the musky quality of the smoke delivered by the pipe. At least there was no remnant of any past fires with a nasty aromatic, like some of the pipes I had cleaned up in the past. I began to consider that maybe the block itself was the culprit. Had the sepiolite leached minerals from the surrounding clay that it had been dug out of? Had the pipe been mistreated or neglected in some way by a previous owner? Could the pipe be capable of providing the smoking pleasures I wanted from it? I found fresh conviction from these questions and became recommitted to my mission of getting this beauty to smoke well, even if it had never done so, which I suspected might be the case. I became convinced that the previous owner must have been lacking in strength of conviction. I was determined to succeed where he had failed. My politically incorrect assumption that the former owner was a man is a logical assumption from knowing that the majority of pipe smokers are men and the fact that I’m an old guy. The adage is that if you want to make a pipe smoke well, then smoke the blazes out of it. I would burn the defiance out of this rogue pipe and bring it into submission. After a week of smoking this pipe almost exclusively, while allowing myself the exemption of smoking another pipe as the first smoke of the day, I no longer suspected that it had been found at the crossroads after midnight, left behind by Robert Johnson while running from the hounds of hell. It was smoking wet by this time, which I reasoned was because of the high density of the block that it was carved from. At this point, I set the pipe down, with the intention of letting it dry out for a week or two, which is what I did after a good scrub, just as I had been doing during the time of purging I put it through. Again, it sat in the handmade case that had been provided for it after the carver was finished. I had been successful in my work to get it to provide a smoke that no longer had the musky character to it. Whether the musky taste had happened because the pipe had never been smoked to the bottom of the chamber or it had been in the block before it was carved was no longer important. The pipe was smoking with clarity now.
Another week went by before I loaded the pipe with Our Best Blend, from Smoker’s Haven, which is a full and rich blend of good character, similar to an early incarnation of Balkan Sobranie. This blend has always been a stellar performer for me, but this time, even though the pipe smoked with clarity, it was a lackluster performance, at best. Past experience had taught me that the majority of meerschaum pipes smoke well with just about anything you choose to burn, but a few pipes had been temperamental, performing well with certain blend types, like English, Balkan, Burley or Virginia blends. This pipe had served notice that I would need to continue my quest to find out what it was destined to incinerate.
The search was started for blends that would perform best in this pipe. I keep a fairly large open rotation of blends, so I put the pipe into my lineup of frequently smoked meerschaum pipes, hoping to solve the mystery through the process of elimination. The low key aspect of this quest became somewhat mythical in character, as I was only smoking the pipe about once every seven to ten days, while I worked through my open tobacco blend rotation, that is somewhere between twenty to thirty different mixtures. After a couple of months, I was no closer to solving this mystery than when I started. Then I opened a tin of Reiner Long Golden Flake, a favorite of mine that I usually kept an open tin of in the rotation, but had simply overlooked, while trying out some new-to-me blends. Throwing caution to the wind, I loaded a bowl in the Koncak meerschaum and fired it up. It was a stellar experience of mystical proportions. Everything came together as only a peak experience can and I hoped that this wasn’t a fluke. I loaded a second bowl and picked up where I had left off with the first bowl. This was it – the big payoff for my work! I can only speculate as to why a small number of meerschaum pipes are this particular in their smoking demands. I suspect that there are a good many of them sitting in a drawer for the lack of a determined pipe smoker who will discover what will be the pipe’s choice for paradise for the lucky man who finds the right blend to smoke. The important thing is to make the commitment to discover what the pipe performs best with by smoking it, and not be one of the guys who put it in a drawer. Just be prepared to wait for paradise.
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