DIY

Public Service Announcement International Pipe Smoking Day—or for us, International Pete Smoking Day—is just around the corner, on Thursday February 20th. As usual there will be a Merit Badge for everyone participating or a Certified Pete Geek certificate if you don’t already have yours. To enter, follow the directions at the bottom of this post. #4/1100: the Supreme POY 2023 X160 This morning’s question: how do you color a Peterson natural sandblast or rusticated pipe? Do you forsake all other pipes and smoke it hourly until it achieves a darkly rich patina? Do you smoke it less frequently, wishing it might move beyond its Ugly Duckling phase?  Or do you try to forget it, letting it languish from loneliness because it never lived up to the romance of the honeymoon? Next to nothing has been written about coloring natural sandblast and rusticated briars, a surprise given how popular they’ve been among Italian pipe smokers for decades. As it turns out, their growing popularity has quite a bit to do with our own Kapp & Peterson. While smooth natural pipes (sometimes imperceptibly stained) have been around since the beginning of briar pipes and usually command a premium. My interest, however, was piqued in the early 2000s by discussions of Castello’s craggy Sea Rock line, but took off when Gianluca at the Sansone Smoking Store in Rome got in touch with me about the release of their Peterson Rogha small batch back in 2017. As I understand it (and correct me if I’m wrong), Italian pipe smokers and the Italian pipe makers value sandblast natural finishes for two reasons: (1) they believe a briar untouched by stain or precarbon coating will breath freer and smoke sweeter than other pipes, and (2) they love being part of what the “character formation” of the pipe—watching it change colors as it’s smoked. From Rome to Dublin isn’t as far as you might think, and when K&P released the Burren line after three years of premium Rogha small batches back in 2018, it was such a success that the idea would eventually become part of Peterson design vocabulary—witness the Nassau Street Edition, the Barley Spigot, the Supreme Sandblast, the DeLuxe Natural Rusticated, the Premier Barley System, the Sherlock Holmes Barley and others.* What motivates this post, however, is my 2017 Rogha, which has become something of an Ugly Duckling--an experience those uninitiated in the mysteries of coloring a natural will all have experienced. I turn, as I always do in such cases, to the experts. First, I asked the good people at Kapp & Peterson for their help understanding how Peterson natural sandblast and rusticated lines are finished—Glen Whelan, Josh Burgess, and Austin Quinlan.  Then I turned to Professor John Schantz for specific advice on how he’s colored his own natural pipes before committing any of my own precious Petes to such treatment.   1. Peterson’s Natural Sandblast & Rustic Pipe Finishing Mark: Glen, Josh, Austin, thanks so much for helping us out this morning. Let…