08.19
I enjoy smoking a pipe as often as I can. Maybe I’m not a big time pipe snob, but usually about once a week is all I can manage. Now that my pipe is broken in (it’s about 3.5 years old), smoking it infrequently is not a problem. It takes a while to get one broken in though and at first it’s a good idea to smoke your pipe as much as possible. This helps build up the carbon “cake” on the inner walls of the pipe bowl and that “cake” is what makes a really good smoking pipe. It absorbs most of the bitter oils and moisture that can make the smoke taste foul. The only downside to smoking your pipe that much though, is that you will need to give it a good deep cleaning about once a month. Here’s how:
Here is my beloved DiMonte pipe. It’s not one of the $300 l33t kind, but it was my first pipe and my wife bought it for me on my birthday. Your first pipe is almost always your favorite. It’s a Gigante and has always smoked great.
To get started cleaning your pipe, place it on a stand or build a base around it with aluminum foil so that the bowl is kept as close to level as possible. You want it as level as it can get, but without letting the mouth of the pipe dip below the rim of the bowl. Most of the time that means that the pipe will need to lean forward a bit unless it’s a full bent style.
Now it’s time to fill the bowl with salt. Yes, you heard me right. Fill the bowl all the way up to the rim with salt. You can use table salt but I used Kosher salt this last time and it seemed to be much more absorbant than granular table salt. Just use what you have. The salt is going to act as a sponge, drawing all the oils and moisture out of the carbon cake.
Now get a dropper and suck up som rubbing alcholol into it. Drip this alcohol into the bowl of the pipe, saturating the salt with it. Don’t stop until you see the level of the alcohol rise to the level of the salt. In other words, fully saturate the salt with the rubbing alcohol until it can’t soak up any more. Now just leave it alone overnight.
When you check it in the morning, it should look like this. Yuck! All that nastiness was in the carbon cake and was messing up the flavor of your tobacco. Just dump all that out and clean it thoroughly to make sure you get every last bit of the salt out. Don’t ever use water on your pipe. Instead, blast it with some compressed air and use plenty of napkins and pipe cleaners to clean it.
You should only go through this cleaning process about once a month at the most. Don’t do it too often or you will inhibit the carbon cake formation. I found this technique originally on the internet a few years ago and I can’t remember where I saw it, so kudo’s to anonymous guy for coming up with it.
