Daily Archives: October 15, 2023

SPECIAL BULLETIN: The 125th Anniversary Commemorative Premier Barley System Drops Wednesday, October 18th @ 6pm EST.   301  The 125th Anniversary Premier Barley System features a sterling ferrule, vulcanite P-Lip and the Barley sandblast finish in an edition of 330 serialized pipes, stamped “1898-2023” in all standard System shapes: 301, 302, 303, 304, 306, 307, 312, 313, 314, 317, B42 and XL315. This 302 sports my all-time favorite shouldered System bend. For their penultimate 125th Anniversary celebration of the System, K&P will release a special Premier commemorative System (and yes, I said penultimate) this Wednesday. As a fan of the Premier, I can vouch for the fact that this is a special event for System fans. The Premier has always been the most difficult System to acquire for the Peterson aficionado as K&P has always made far fewer of them than the DeLuxe, and it looks like it will continue to be that way, so to see a Premier in the special Barley—or tanshell finish—well now, that's my idea of an anniversary celebration pipe! 303 The generic term tanshell has come to mean any pipe with a light tan sandblast. It derives, as does so much in briar pipe history, from Dunhill, who introduced their Tanshell finish in 1952, per Joe Morris, who kindly wrote to say that "the Dunhill Tanshell finish first appeared in 1952 (I've got one). There's an idea that they were using Shell Algerian briar stock for that first year as a test before switching to the Sardinian briar for 1953 (at least I think that's right) but it was definitely first produced in 1952."  Pipedia.org has a fine collection of Dunhill Tanshell photos. Here’s one of my favorite examples from Dunhill, a 1953 LC: 1953 Dunhill LC Tanshell - Erik Hesse Collection (Courtesy Pipedia.org) Pipedia, incidentally, has a number of great photographs of Dunhill Tanshells from Dr. Hesse's collection and I encourage you not only to visit their Erik Hesse / Tanshell page but support the Pipedia website as well, as  web-hosting costs only becomes more expensive the larger a site becomes. I don’t have a set-in-stone answer to give concerning how K&P creates their version of the tanshell finish, but I can give you a few details. 304 he pre-story of the tanshell at K&P concerns Mario Lubinski’s special Peterson Rogha natural vergin pipes for Sansonne Smoking Store in Rome beginning in 2016. These were extremely limited, as you can read in Post #88. A natural vergin is not a tanshell, although it’s very close. A natural vergin is a finish developed by the Italians. It’s absolutely spotless, clean and unwaxed with a bare chamber and develops a patina from the oils of the smoker’s hands. 305* After the Rogha line, Peterson introduced the Burren line in 2018, which you can research in Post #102. This was the proletariat version, I suppose we might say, of the Rogha natural vergin. While unfinished and unwaxed, it was comprised of sandblast bowls with root marks, pits…