Tasting Pipe Tobaccos: Should We Become More Disciplined About This?

"Tasting Pipe Tobaccos: Should we Become more Disciplined about this?" is an essay debating whether pipe tobacco tasting could acquire a shared method and vocabulary the way wine tasting has. Its starting point is a simple question: how valid is an impression written about a blend for another smoker reading it? The essay argues, by listing the factors that make this validity difficult, that evaluating pipe tobacco involves far more variables than one might assume.

Author and Publication Context

The essay's author, Fred J. Hanna, is an academic whose primary field of expertise is psychological counseling and psychotherapy. By his own account, he worked in the wine industry for many years, ran numerous blind tastings, and published a bulletin containing tasting notes; he grounds his writing on pipes in this same experience. The community's honorary title "Doctor of Pipes" was awarded to him in 2010. This title has been presented to two people each year since 1998 at the international pipe show in Chicago, with candidates determined by the vote of previous recipients. His essay collection The Perfect Smoke was published by NASPC Press; he is also cited as a co-designer of certain blends prepared for McClelland.

The text was first published in The Pipe Collector, the bimonthly bulletin of the North American Society of Pipe Collectors. The club, headquartered in Columbus, was founded in 1993 under the name Ohio Pipe Collectors; among its founders was writer Regis McCafferty. As membership extended beyond state borders, the organization took its current name, and the bulletin also began appearing under the title The Pipe Collector starting in March 1997. The general framework of club tradition is covered in the history of pipe clubs entry.

Three Sets of Variables

The essay's real contribution is that it takes the factors affecting taste out of the realm of scattered observations and groups them under three headings.

Group	Main variables listed
Tobacco	Cut style, moisture content, time spent unopened in the tin, burn temperature, amount of smoke released, the difference between the tin's smell and the smoke's smell
Pipe	Bowl size, which part of the bowl is burning, the state of the carbon layer on the bowl wall, how well the pipe distributes heat, the pipe's cleanliness, the workmanship of the shank-to-stem transition
Smoker	Packing tightness, breathing rate and depth, expectation and bias, personal blend preference, residue left in the mouth

Many of these headings are the subject of separate entries: tin resting time is covered under tobacco aging, the layer on the bowl wall under the carbon layer, and the effect of bowl size on smoking is detailed in the pipe bowl size entry.

Comparison with Wine Tasting

The essay turns to wine not to draw an equivalence but to show where the two pursuits part ways. Wine is evaluated in the form in which it is poured into the glass; pipe tobacco, by contrast, can only be tasted once it has burned and changed form, and moreover this burning takes place in a bowl carrying the trace of tobaccos smoked before it. The layer on the bowl wall is considered both necessary for a proper smoke and unavoidably part of the taste. To this is added the fact that the smoker cannot smell his own pipe from the outside; the same blend smells different in someone else's hands. In wine tasting the palate can be cleansed between samples and many can be tried one after another, while in tobacco the residue left in the mouth prevents such a sequence. From this the essay concludes that tasting notes carry meaning only when their conditions are stated, not on their own.

Impact and Aftermath

The essay's concrete suggestion is adapting the descriptive vocabulary established in wine tasting to pipe tobacco. Steps have been taken in this direction within the community: NASPC prepared a tobacco evaluation form for distribution to members, and aggregate review databases such as tobaccoreviews.com have also created a shared record format for blends. The essay's closing idea is a direct consequence of its list of variables: the pipe and the tobacco are not two objects that can be evaluated separately, but a single whole that defines each other.