Briar Coating

[Sasquatch]

Olive for sure is more absorbant than briar. My olive pipes smoke dead dry with no break in. It is quite possibly a better wood, from a purely smoking perspective, than briar.

[Alan L]

It may be extreme to totally deny the porosity credit. I will refute this with an extreme example. Have you guys tried a metal pipe?

I've smoked out of just about every class of material pipes have been made of, including briar, cherry, olive, dogwood (nice wood!), walnut, corncob, unglazed porcelain, glazed porcelain, glazed stoneware, unglazed stoneware, unglazed earthenware (the best of the clays, in my opinion), Meerschaum (both Turkish and African), soapstone, Catlinite, brass, bronze, steel, aluminum, glass, deer antler (nasty), and in one extreme incident an apple (!). I'll admit, the substance being smoked in some of these materials was not tobacco (and for those it's been nearly 20 years since partaking of any illicit substance ), but you can still taste differences based on the pipe, trust me.

I don't think anyone is denying that woods are porous, I think all they're saying is not to overestimate the importance of the effect. For instance, one of those brass pipes was a very dry smoke due to the way the airway was designed.

On the other hand I have two antique stub-stem clay pipes, one glazed stoneware (nonporous) and one unglazed earthenware or terracotta (very porous. The stoneware one has a cane stem, and smokes wetter than any pipe I have. The earthenware one has a lucite/acrylic stem and smokes drier than any pipe I have. My two or three unglazed kaolin (that white pipeclay that's almost porcelain) pipes are somewhere in between. The funny thing is, they all taste about the same despite the difference in moisture levels.

My African meerschaum smokes hot and wet because it's a badly designed oom-paul with a severely constricted airway, not because it isn't a little absorbent.

What I'm trying to say here is that in my experience in over twenty one years or so of pipe smoking, airway design has far more to do with how a pipe smokes than does the material of which it's made.

[LexKY_Pipe]

Great pix Rad. Very helpful.