PSOI

by Glen Whelan Three generations of Whelans: Tony, Glen, and Sophie (Glen's niece), all working at K&P on the same day! Glen Whelan is K&P’s Sales Director and arguably the company’s most valuable Erin go Bragh asset. He agreed some time back to annotate one of his favorite small batch projects, the PSOI or Pipe Smokers of Ireland Pipe of the Year. PSOI, for those of you who haven’t joined yet, is a Facebook group that Keirren Townsend brought into being at the beginning of 2014 and now has over 2,000 members. From the very beginning, Glen wanted to offer the group something special—a pipe of the year—which he has either designed or collaborated on with the group every year since the group’s beginning. With the 2021 pipe just appearing, this seemed to be a good time to offer a visual history of this wonderful small batch.   2014 - This was the first edition of the pipe, and it is the rarest of them, with only 15 pipes produced for the group. It was the same bowl used for the Iceberg Collection Port shape [B57] and featured a Celtic scroll silver band, Cumberland acrylic stem with a rich dark brown stained bowl.   2015 - The group was really growing at this stage and we wanted to acknowledge the Irish roots of the group and what better way to do that? A green pipe! The PSOI founder, Keirren Townsend, decided upon the Strand shape [XL25] for the 2015 release and it was also accented by a Celtic silver band which we engraved with PSOI 2015. I think we produced75 pieces.   2015 - (Christmas Edition) - As the popularity of the group continued to increase, coupled with the fact a lot of guys had missed out on the order deadline for the 2015 pipe, we decided to offer a Christmas edition. This was limited to 30 pipes and featured a tan sandblasted 606, Royal Irish silver mounting and a Cumberland stem. The silver band also featured an engraved Christmas Tree. This was my favourite pipe we’ve done for the PSOI and to this day I still regret not getting one!   2016 - The 2016 pipe was the most popular release of them all as it had a greater significance to the founder, Keir. 2016 was the 100th anniversary of Ireland’s independence and Keir wanted to acknowledge that with the group pipe. With that in mind we opted to try to replicate the Irish Tricolour within the pipe. We chose a green Cumberland stem [for the Sherlock Holmes Squire / XL15 bulldog shape], the silver to represent the white and the linseed oiled bowl to represent the gold/orange of the flag. We also limited this to 100 pipes (100 years) but to be honest we could have sold 300 this year! 2017 - For the 2017, we decided to go to traditional Peterson. The guys had been yearning for a System group pipe for some time, so we chose…