Dan Pipe

Dan Pipe was a German pipe and tobacco house founded in 1972 in Geesthacht, east of Hamburg, that over fifty-one years first sold pipes by mail order and later ran its own tobacco factory as well. Its founder, Heiko Behrens, was a pipe enthusiast studying education science; he began bringing Danish handmade pipes to Germany to help pay for his studies. What set out as a small mail-order operation ran past half a century.

The Catalogue at Its Core

The backbone of the business was not a storefront but a thick catalogue printed once a year. Its first issue came out in 1972, with pipes signed by Former, Emil Chonowitsch, and Poul Hansen on its pages. The Danish School was still newly known in Germany in those years, and Emil Chonowitsch was the father of Jess Chonowitsch, who would later be cited even more than his father. Coverage expanded quickly: British and French brands, select pipe tobaccos, imported cigars, and a tobacco line called Torben Dansk joined the list. After 1984 a second catalogue for pipes made in the business's own workshop, and after 1996 one devoted to cigars, became part of the same arrangement. Preparing the catalogues and designing the tobacco labels was Holger Frickert's work.

Names and Addresses

The brand name was changed for a time, to Danske Pibe, over a trademark dispute. Sources do not agree on the year of this change; what is certain is that the business worked under this name from the second half of the 1970s until 1991. Addresses also changed often: Hamburg in 1976, Grashof — an old former farmhouse — in 1985, Lauenburg after 2001. Frickert joined the company as a student working on the shop's interior fit-out during the move to Hamburg; he left dental studies unfinished, took over as shop manager in 1977, and set up a workshop for small-scale handmade pipe production.

Dan Tobacco

The wish to control the quality and supply of its own house tobaccos turned in 1991 into a tobacco factory set up in an old malt mill on the banks of the Elbe. With the founding of this company, which took the name Dan Tobacco (DTM), Danske Pibe also reverted to its original name. The factory's first blender was Jürgen Westphal; head blending duties later passed to Andreas Mund. Over time more than a hundred blends were developed: classic Latakia mixtures, Virginia flakes, and floral or fruity aromatic blends.

Fire and Closure

A fire that broke out at Grashof in the autumn of 2001 rendered the shop, warehouse, workshop, and office in the building unusable; by the business's own account, the fire had been set deliberately. Operations moved to the factory building in Lauenburg, and records state that mail order resumed within five weeks.

Dan Pipe closed in its fifty-first year: mail order ended on May 30, 2023, and the shop in Lauenburg on July 31, 2023. According to staff statements to the press, the reason was the burden that track-and-trace obligations and European tobacco regulation placed on small-scale operations. The stock and mail-order business passed to a tobacconist in Geesthacht. Heiko Behrens had died earlier that same year, on April 28, at the age of seventy-nine. Tobacco production continues as a separate company under the name DTM. Alongside long-established German makers such as Vauen, Dan Pipe is remembered less for what it produced itself than for what it curated and for its catalogue-based system.