Okay, had my dumplings, Rocco's working on a bowl of Lamb and Apple, wife's watching Star Trek, so I can focus.
Briar comes out of the mill soaking wet, and often ships that way. Mimmo and Makis are pretty good about sending blocks that have had a little dry time, the wettest I've had were from Calabria, I think they were 30 days post boil. And I mean, the box is just humid, spongey, and the blocks dripping wet. BriarwoodSRL ships pretty wet too.
Wet briar is heavy, it bonks together with a real dull "clunk". Older, drier briar sounds almost like metal when you clink 'em, a real sharp sound.
So you have briar from where-ever, and probably the stuff is not even a year old. You might see moisture bleeding out when you cut the chamber, but again, that's gonna happen if the humidity in the room is above 50%, it's not really an indicator of anything in particular. I think 6 months is probably a good minimum for some kind of stabilization - if the stuff is drying and moving, your mortise will change sizes, any flush fitments, stem/shank transition etc will change. And some of this will happen anyway if you ship the pipe to the north pole, it just will. But if you look on eBay you'll see pipes where the stem joint just isn't good
anymore where 30 years ago it was. The briar moves.
When you sit on a block for a long time, it gets harder, it changes color to a sort of uniform chestnut brown. And it becomes more stable, moves less, seasonally, than fresh wood. It's oxydized or petrified or something, I really don't know. But I've got wood here from the Romeo mill from 20 years ago, and it's just brown through and through. Romeo wood from about 10 years ago is a nice mellow golden color, and Romeo wood from 3 years ago is just a little grey, it's kind of colorless, but will eventually catch up. Fresh it's sort of a piney-yellow with some pink hue. In smoking, the older wood is noticeable, the break in time, any perceived change in the pipe for the user is very minimal, and I suspect that's the bonus here - I think when you smoke a pipe you accelerate whatever oxydizing processes are occuring with heat and moisture exchange. And that's sort of already occurred in these older blocks.
I watch these wet blocks twist and morph as they dry, and I think "Damn, good thing I didn't make a pipe out of that." Once they stabilize after a year or so I can recut them and they stay straight. At that point I stop worrying so much.
Mimmo suggests 2 years as being a point where the wood he ships has hit the important part of the curve - it changes more in those 2 years than in the next 2, as it were. And I won't disagree with that. I just think the longer you can sit on this shit, the better it is. I sent a customer of mine a pipe made from the very last block of Spanish wood that I had around here (hadn't bought since about 2012) a few years back, and he has a pile of my pipes, but this one blew him away. It was noticeably and remark-worthily different. 7 years on the shelf. Now, I think each mill tastes and smokes just a little different anyway, but when I send out pipes made from older wood, I get pretty consistent feedback on the smoking and break in, and often blind, I sometimes don't tell people what they are smoking. And it's always positive on older wood. I made a guy a zulu many years back, opened my box from Mimmo, found the piece, made the pipe. And it sucked, it never was really great. I wound up replacing it a year later. I think the briar was just too fresh. No slight to Mimmo, it was a very fresh piece.
I buy
shitpiles of briar. I feel it's getting harder to come by for political and other reasons.... our fun little hobby is never going to be made easier by any government involved. So I buy what I can when I can. If someone retires, I buy their wood. If someone has a batch that grandpa bought, I buy it. This has left me with all kinds of neat stuff, Algerian from back when it was good, Spanish, Calabrian, Ligurian, Tuscan... really really nice to have all this stuff. The down side is that every different source finishes differently, tools different, sands different, stains different. So in terms of offering really consistent product, I don't really. (I was offered great advice ten years ago by a legit big time pipe maker, and he said "It really doesn't matter who you buy from. Buy only from them, get GOOD with that product." That was sound advice, and I've ignored it probably almost to the point of folly.) But I see briar as being like tobacco - buy it when you find it. At worst, you can sell it down the road. But it's not getting easier to come by. And I feel like the "good stuff" I'm seeing this year is less good, or at least I'm seeing less of it. I used to just knock out straight grain smooths any time I wanted - reach into the big bag and pull out a perfect block. Now, it's .... specialer. Lots of blocks being sold to lots of people, and everyone wants the good shit.
At the end of the day, many many pipes being made in the last 100 years are complete pieces of shit. Bad wood, bad geometry, bad stems. We can easily do better, and even if you sell a fairly fresh piece of wood, with a few smokes, it will likely sort itself out, is my thought. Mostly, our customers don't care. They like the shape, the blast, the stem work... this stuff is far more important to most pipe smokers than the provenance of the briar. I do have the occassional guy say "Okay I only want THIS wood from now on." but even then I'm not sure if I made them a pipe from the mill next door... would they notice? Or is what they like my stemwork and my drilling? I dunno. (We had a club pipe done, couple hundred units, a few years ago. Mine's adequate. And I've talked to 20 or so people about theirs, and of them, 1 single guy said "Yeah, I dunno, that briar felt just... a little green to me somehow. Pipe is fine, but...." and he's a huge pipe nerd, has tons of big league pipes. And I felt that way too, I felt the briar was just a little....peaky somehow, a little fresh. Can I prove it? No not really. And again, everyone else loved the pipes, so we're talking about something a little ethereal here anyhow.
Buy what you can afford to. Put the best blocks aside for next year. Or 5 years. Or 10. Build a stash of aged, top grade wood. Make pipes in the meantime.
