POY – Limited Edition

At Portillo’s, that restaurant-of-restaurants, that Hot Dog Stand of Paradise and de rigueur eatery for generations of Chicagoland Pipe Show attendees, fellow CPG Gary Hamilton and I recently met in north Texas to discuss pipes, pipes and pipes. Fortunately for us, Portillo’s understands how crucial it is to have a satellite branch for Pete Geeks west of the Mississippi. We sat in a booth almost under the photo of a pipe-smoking guy. That’s right, there’s a huge photo of a guy smoking his pipe while repairing a boot sole in the Texas branch of Portillo’s. Count down 4 signs from the top right. Guy working on boot sole. Didn't think to photograph it while we were there. As per usual, we removed several pipes from our bags pertinent to the discussion. For myself, I needed advice on my 2023 SPD D20. I adore this shape as I’ve said too many times, and while I companion the 2016 POY version, when the SPD came along . . . well, you know how “PPAD” (Peterson Pipe Addiction Disorder) is—and with the tricolor ring, I couldn’t say no. The problem, as I told Gary, is that the SPD doesn’t seem to be smoking as well as the POY. Normally when this happens, if I can’t figure out a solution, I pass the pipe along to someone who hopefully will have a better experience with it. But I want to keep this one, not as a collection piece (I’m not really a collector) but as a rotation pipe. To me it's important in the shape chart because it grows organically in the soil of the Peterson house style, achieving the rare feat of being strikingly contemporary and distinctively Irish while providing clear ques to its ancestry in its muscular shank and straight-sided stack chamber. The SPD 2023 (top) and LE 2016 (bottom) D20s. Notice the slight difference in the stem shoulders. So Gary took a look. Same chamber size, same diameter of smoke channel in the stummel, same basic stem as the original. But the POY has a chamfered tenon and a deeper-channeled button: maybe, Gary said, all I needed to do to bring the SPD’s performance up to the POY’s was to address these issues. We both agreed there could be one more problem that is always a consideration when dealing with same-shaped pipes: the briar. That’s in the hands of Mother Nature and the good people who harvest and cure the briar, which is why an inexpensive pipe sometimes smokes as good or better than one costing a lot more. If it’s the briar, or if these mods make the smoke channel too open, I won’t have achieved a thing but done the pipe a disservice. Ah well. Choices have consequences and the life of a pipeman can be hard at times!   Opening the Smoke Channel. I've posted about this process too recently to make much of it here, but I wanted to at least document the difference between the two…