Edwin Pipes (Kris Edwin Barber)

Edwin Pipes is the brand under which American pipe maker Kris Edwin Barber signs his work. Barber works in Grand Marais, at the northeastern tip of Minnesota on the north shore of Lake Superior; the town, seat of Cook County, is one of the gateways to the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters wilderness area. The brand is one example of artisan production run from a single bench: shapes rebuilt on each piece rather than a series mold, and limited output.

From Repair to Making

By Barber's account, his first encounter with the pipe dates to years spent living in the Bavarian Alps in Germany. The road that led to making opened in 2010, when he encountered a high-grade handmade pipe. Barber began not with making but with repair: he collected worn estate pipes cheaply, restored them, and put them back into circulation. By his own account he repaired hundreds of pipes over nearly two years, and during this time learned hands-on the criteria for correctly drilling the airway, tenon clearance, angle, and wall thickness. After buying a briar burl and making his first pipe in 2012, he never returned to repair work. He sustained pipe making alongside a corporate job for six years; in 2018 he left a mid-level management position for full-time production and moved his workshop to the shore of Lake Superior.

Formal Language and Series

Edwin pipes fall most easily under the freehand heading, though Barber does not take the approach of simply leaving the burl's natural line as is; hard and soft surfaces are deliberately brought together on the same body. On the official site, work is divided into five groups, with display stands presented under a separate heading. In the "Dragons" group, sharp protrusions and pointed angles are used together with flowing lines; in "Elephant's Shields," the essential idea is that each line connects seamlessly to the next. The remaining three groups consist of churchwardens, pipes drawing inspiration from the peoples of the Lord of the Rings universe, and open-ended experiments adding small touches to traditional shapes.

Two of the brand's preferences are easily read from these groups. The first is the weight given to churchwarden length: a long mouthpiece is prized for delivering smoke more coolly to the mouth, but it is a laborious shape to make and rarely seen in today's handmade pipe scene. The second is the display stands made to match each pipe's color and line; the stands appear in Barber's catalog as a heading on par with the pipes themselves.

Material and Craftsmanship

Barber's primary material is briar; for mouthpieces, records indicate he uses ebonite. This hardened-rubber-based material is the established choice for mouthpieces because, once worked, it stays soft in the mouth and can be brought down to thin sections; the general properties of the material are covered in the entry on mouthpiece materials. Records also indicate that split-stem mouthpieces are among the solutions he turns to often. Barber says he gained his bench discipline not from formal training but from his repair years, and that the many pipes he handled over a long stretch taught him a habit of careful measurement.