A Conversation With Greg Pease: A Blender's Own Account

A Conversation With Greg Pease is the title of the interview Jon Tillman conducted with Gregory L. Pease, published on Smokingpipes.com. The text itself is copyrighted; here only the facts it contains are summarized, checked against independent records. The interview is one of the documents frequently cited when discussing the history of the G.L. Pease brand and boutique tobacco production of the 2000s; the archived record was last updated in 2007.

The Shop Years in Berkeley

Drucquer & Sons, mentioned in the first part of the interview, is a tobacconist founded in London in 1841 and relocated to Berkeley, California, in 1928. Robert Rex bought the shop in 1964 and ran it until 1982. Pease's first encounter with the shop came in 1978, while he was a university student; in later years he repaired pipes there and prepared the shop's house blends. Among the blends of that period Sublime Porte is named; Inns of Court, from the shop's old catalog, is another name mentioned in the text.

Return to Tobacco and the Founding of the Brand

Pease relates that after finishing school he worked in the computer industry for about eighteen years, returned to the tobacco business at the start of 1998, and that the first blends reached retailers' shelves within a few months. Independent records show this first venture was Friedman & Pease, founded with Irwin Friedman, a partnership that lasted about eighteen months. The G.L. Pease, Ltd. known today was founded in 2000, with production and distribution gradually taken over by Cornell & Diehl.

Blends and the Supply Problem

When describing his blend development method in the interview, two products are given as examples: Barbary Coast, built around a batch of burley on hand, and Montgomery, still new at the time of the interview. Pease also states that despite it being the best-selling type in the world, he does not produce aromatic blends.

The text's historical value comes chiefly from the supply section. Pease says that when an indispensable component for a blend cannot be found, rather than changing the recipe he discontinues the product, and that he pulled four of his blends from production because of a shortage of Syrian-sourced Latakia. According to independent sources, the direct cause of this shortage was a warehouse fire in late 2004 that destroyed the bulk of the US stock of Syrian Latakia; among the affected blends were Renaissance, Raven's Wing, Mephisto, and Bohemian Scandal.

California at the Time

The closing sections of the interview are devoted to tobacco's political standing in California. Here, Proposition 10, passed by referendum in 1998 and imposing an additional tax per pack, is mentioned. Pease believes the public debate was conducted disproportionately, and notes that pipe and cigar smokers, being a numerically small community, were left on the margins of that debate. In this respect the text records not only one producer's working routine but also how the American pipe community of the period positioned itself.