Correct filling ensures your pipe does not unlit. Fill your tobacco looser in the bottom and harder towards the top. Humid tobacco should be filled looser than drier tobacco. Practice filling. If too loose, the light goes out. Too hard, and you gain a pipe hard to smoke that often become "fluidly". While smoking, you need to stuff the tobacco with the pipetool once in a while to ensure a good flame.
It's Time to Light Up
Use matches or a gas lighter for lighting. Ensure the lighting of your entire tobacco surface while you gently smoke it. Some prefer to let the initial light die out before "tightening" and relighting. Find your own preferred way.
Keeping Your Pipe Lit
The secret to a steadily burning tobacco is in the packing of each individual blend. Each type of mixture burns and packs differently.
Rough cube cuts pack firmly. Flake cuts pack medium firm. Mixed cuts (med) pack firmly but with a slight spring.
If your pipe keeps going out, you have packed your blend too tight. Here is how you correct that. Insert shank poker of pipe tool into back of bowl down to air hole. If you get tongue bite, you have packed your blend too loose.
Smoke All The Tobacco In The Bowl
You may smoke one bowl of tobacco 3 or 4 times. Tamp remaining tobacco and relight and smoke again.
The reward is a good "cake" formed all the way down into the heel of the bowl. Proper cake is important (the carbon formed on the inside of the bowl! The carbon absorbs moisture giving you a drier smoke. And the carbon retains the flavor of the tobacco giving you a sweeter smoke.
Pipe Smoking Is a Gentle Art
Savor your pipe. Puff gently and steadily. Enjoy the taste and aroma. Pipes are smoked in a calmer manner than cigarettes.
This ensures a cooler, tastier smoke. Initially you might experience a smoke too hot for comfort of your tongue. A thin line of smoke emerging from your pipe is the tell-tell-sign of a calm smoker. Inhalation is not necessary in order to enjoy the taste. Tobacco pipe smoking tips
Smokers' Etiquette
Pipe Cleaners are a Pipe's Best Friend.
After smoking your pipe, run a pipe cleaner through the stem all the way to the bottom of the bowl. This will absorb the excess moisture and it will keep your pipe sweeter for you. To avoid acidification in your pipe, smoking the tobacco all the way down is essential. Thus you should fill your pipe according to the time at your disposal. When the pipe is totally empty, the pipe can easily be emptied by a few taps underneath with your finger. Do not hammer. Another way to break a pipe is to remove the mouthpiece before the pipe is cold.
Cooling a pipe
A hot pipe needs a cooling off period between smokes. A cool pipe gives you more flavor from both pipe and tobacco. Like foods, if they are too hot you can't enjoy the full flavor. That's why seasoned smokers rotate their pipes, 2 or more during the day.
Breaking in Your Pipe
As with good shoes, pipes need to be broken in: Your 10-15 first pipes smoked should be gradually filled with 1/3 to 2/3 of the full tobacco level. Smoke your pipes to the bottom each time. Thus a protective carbon layer is formed from the bottom up preventing burning of your briar pipe wood. Note that these first pipes produces a warmer smoke with a sharper taste, but it should not "bite" your tongue - the primary "turn-off" of new pipe smokers.
Care and Feeding of Your Pipe
Your pipe is breakable. The tenon is most prone to mishap so never knock out your pipe by holding it by the bit. The tenon will snap. Never remove the bit from the shank when the pipe is hot. Again, you will snap the tenon or split the wall of the shank. Remove the bit only when your pipe is cool.
Good caretaking influences the taste. Use paper napkins and pipe cleaners. From time to time the carbon layer needs to be trimmed with a special pipe knife or a profiler. Ensure a uniform layer and avoid pointed knives as they easily damages your pipe.
Choosing Your Pipe
For most people, the design is the main criteria when selecting a pipe. That is fine as long as a few other things are taken into consideration. The cheapest pipes don't always have the adequate properties. One of these you can visually check for yourself: Make sure the smoke channel is aligned with the bottom of the tobacco hole. If too high, your pipe becomes acidly. Also ensure that the mouthpiece is properly fitted to the pipe head.
Choosing your tobacco it is a good idea to start with "pure" tobaccos. Then it is up to you to explore. How to Start Smoking a Pipe
.. and ENJOY PIPE SMOKING!
With pipe smoking you will enjoy a variety of flavors that no other type of smoking can offer you. To discover your own individual taste in a tobacco blend, a little patience and exploration is necessary. The cake retains the flavor of each tobacco smoked. When trying a new blend, give it a chance. A pipe full of this and a pipe full of that not only confuses you, but also the pipe. Let the cake of a pipe fully absorb the flavor of each new blend. It's a great idea to reserve one pipe for one particular blend.
Pipe smoking, like any specialized pursuit, is replete with it's own cryptic words. Here is presented a glossary of words particular to pipe smoking, defined so that you may not only smoke like an accomplished pipe smoker, but speak as one also.