Pipe Smoking Information & Resources
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YouTube
A pipe smoker in Germany, who also happens to be a history professor, I don’t watch this channel primarily for factual information about pipes or tobacco. He has been posting videos for a decade now, and in most of them he is smoking a pipe, and he usually does talk about what he’s smoking. But much of his content is him telling stories about the places he’s standing in the videos, or telling stories of things that happened there. If you ever find yourself sitting down for a long, leisurely pipe, and you want something interesting and sort of soothing to listen to, give his channel a try.
Mike has a number of really useful videos on pipe shapes and cleaning and maintaining your pipes.
How to maintain & clean your pipe - This is the first in his cleaning series, and does a nice job going through the basics of deep cleaning. This is not something you need to do (or should) after every time you smoke it. For many of us, deep cleaning once or twice a year is sufficient. But in the video you get ideas of things you can do more frequently to keep your pipe “fresh.”
While a lot of the videos they post are announcements of upcoming releases (i.e. ads), go back a few years in the Videos tabs and they have a number of videos on specific tobacco varietals that are short and informative.
A young guy looking to get younger people into pipe smoking. Because of that, though, he’s got a lot of good content for newer smokers.
Pipe Smoking MASTERCLASS: How to Properly Pack a Tobacco Pipe - You can skip to about 6:00 into this video to get to the point when he starts going through the packing technique that was shown to him by Jeremy Reeves, the master blender at Cornell & Diehl. Even if you don’t fully adopt this method, there are a lot of good points for you to think about in here with your own packing.
Chris Herriot is an English pipe maker living in France. He posts videos every week or so showing what he has been working on and talking about things pipe and tobacco related. His pipes lean toward classic shapes and styling.
If you get more interested in the pipe side of pipe smoking, this is worth checking out. Jeff Gracik is one of the preeminent American artisan pipe makers. If you want to see how an artisan handmakes a pipe, his channel has videos showing the whole process.
He’s the godfather of the YouTube pipe community. For many of us, his series on the basics of pipe smoking was our starting point. More recently, he has started doing something called Blend Club, a monthly, online video review of different tobacco blends. The list of blends is put out ahead of time so you can buy a sample of ones you’re interested in and smoke them before his video on that one comes out. It’s a great way to get a better idea of what you’re tasting in different blends and why.
Just the Basics Playlist - This series of videos takes you through the whole process of smoking a pipe, from start to finish.
This channel has tons of reviews of blends, and videos about pipe smoking in general.
This is the channel for the largest online retailer of pipes, tobacco, and pipe accessories, so expect a lot of product videos. But, scattered throughout are a number of interesting and informative videos, like the mystery blend series.
SmokingPipes University Playlist - Six of the twelve videos in this series are on different aspects of pipe smoking, and definitely worth checking out.
Kind of a “lifestyle” channel, he has thousands videos covering a huge range of topics. His overall style is pretty popular, and his reviews tend to be some of the more balanced out there.
Pipe Hobby Playlist - This playlist contains all of the pipe videos he has put on the channel (570 at the time I am writing this).