Tobacco

  The Texas Pipe Show is next weekend, and I'm hoping to see you there! THANKS TO OUR PETE GEEK DONORS, Our table will be overflowing with vintage as well as popular tins, amazing Petes at all price ranges, "basket pipes" from $20 and artisan pipes by our own Fletch Hiner, a Stanwell - S. Bang, and a Torben Dansk - Paul Winslow. There will even be a Silver Gray NAP 312.   Doctor of Pipes Mark Berman, Lone Star Briar Works Mark Domingues, and a cast of rowdies hope you'll join them for a pre-show breakfast at DICK'S UPTOWN CAFE, Cedar Hill, at 7:15am. Check out the menu. Yes, it's this good.     THE OWL SHOP: SANCTUARY IN THE WILDERNESS   Two weekends ago I visited The Owl Shop in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the historic tobacconists of America. It’s been around since 1934 and been blending the same pipe tobaccos they've been making all along. Sitting with my friend Ken Sigel, each of us smoking our Petes, it occurred that we don’t often stop to celebrate the unsung local heroes who craft our tobaccos. You can probably list a few of them if you’re of an age, but when I returned home I thought to ask a man who knows, James Foster CPG, President of the Austin Pipe Club, who works with a coalition across Texas to bring us the Texas Pipe Show. James was certified as a CST or Certified Salesforce Tobacconist back around 2015 by the Tobacconist University. He said, “As to the retailers who do actual blending [like The Owl Shop]—for the most part they are all just ordering bulk blends and then mixing that.  But about 95% of all retailers just pour blends into a jar and slap their own logos on them, and a good portion of those say “oh, we blend in-house.” When they don’t. There are only a few retailers that I can think of who really do their own in-house blending: Boswell, Country Squire, Bennington Tobacconist (Florida), Edwards, L. J. Peretti, Smoker’s Abbey (Tennessee), Straus Tobacconist, Uhles, Watch City Cigar.” An original Kapp Bros. tobacco paper from the Peterson Archive (courtesy Kapp & Peterson) Frederick Kapp in his Dublin shop not only blended tobaccos, as you may recall from The Peterson Pipe, but could create a pipe for you. You could also relax with a game of billiards or just settle in the smoking room.  Seen above is a tobacco paper from the Kapp Bros. era after Frederick's death. Back then, tobacconists in Ireland and the UK measured tobacco in a scale, then pressed it into a form and wrapped it in a paper like that seen above. Just a few years later, you may recall, I learned my vocation as a pipe smoker with a real tobacconist like Kapp and others James Foster mentions at Ted’s Pipe Shoppe in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ted Kanaley formulated the recipes for all ther tobaccos in the late 1950s and they’re still sold…