At The Brew Pub

Our time in the Poconos is beginning to draw to an end. We leave on Sunday. Amazing how quickly a month passes.

Today we went back to Barley Creek Brewery, where we had dinner the other night and bought a growler of their Rescue IPA beer. We wanted to take the tour of the brewery and get a free tasting. We were not disappointed. We thoroughly enjoyed it. The beer was good and the lunch was even better.




Coming home I was really ready for a pipe. Smoked another bowl of Triple Play in my Peter Heeschan blowfish. Perfect!

After a dinner of bar b que lamb chops I am relaxing with a bowl of Burley Flake #1 in a corn cob and listening to the Phillies game.

Another great day.

Pipe Pictures

A magnificent morning. The heavy, all day rains of yesterday wiped out the extreme heat and humidity of the past few days and I am enjoying my morning tea and a bowl of Burley Flake #1 on the deck with the temperature in the high 60's and what feels like no humidity. I thought I'd take a summer time picture to offset all those winter pictures I post during the year.

And speaking of pictures, I was browsing around the web, reading the NY Times as I do each morning and read an article about Matthew Brady, the great chronicler of the Civil War. There was a link there to the National Archives collection of his photos of the war and among the first I clicked on yielded this picture of Allan Pinkerton and his men, the spies of the Union Army. Pinkerton is the one in the background relaxing with his pipe!



Hope you enjoy this beautiful day!

UPDATE

Much as I hate to have too many tins of tobacco open at one time, I decided this morning that I'd had enough of either Burley Flake expression and so I broke open the tin of G.L.Pease's new plug tobacco Triple Play. If you check back you'll find my reports of his first plug attempt, Jack Knife. You'll find that while I liked it, I didn't love it. More importantly, you'll find my lack of patience with the process of cutting and rubbing the tobacco. Partly, I now realize, this may be a result of the particularly moist nature of the plug. Be that as it may, I have to admit that I'm still not sold on the need to slice and dice before smoking. That said, I love Triple Play! I'd forgotten that VaPers are still my favorite tobaccos I've been experimenting with so many different blends lately. And this is among the best VaPers I've had in a long while. I'm not a very expert tobacco reviewer, but if you check out this review on Pipesmoking Magazine you will find a very thorough job with which I fully agree.

Sent via DROID on Verizon Wireless

Summer Reflections Continued

Three straight days of posts! My apologies, but it helps the time pass pleasurably. As I mentioned, I've been doing a good deal of reading. In addition to the four serious novels that I've read, I've managed a couple of good mysteries and a few books of poetry and criticism. All of this reading has been accomplished on my Kindle! I have probably 200 books at my disposal with this wonderful device. Up until recently I found that the Kindle's only drawback was the generally popular nature of its content: tough to find books of more limited interest, like serious Judaica, philosophy, poetry, criticism, or pipes. That has changed. I have with me some fairly esoteric "volumes" in each of these categories, including the last which was the most recent surprise. Browsing for books about Pipes, Pipe Smoking, or Tobacco I found "In Search of Pipe Dreams" by Rick Newcombe. I was leery. Given the fact that this book was advertised as containing many photos I wondered how it would come through in the Kindle edition. So I ordered a free sample, one of the best parts of the whole Amazon set-up, and was pleasantly surprised. Granted the photos would look better in color, something I'm sure future Kindle editions will be soon able to handle, none the less to someone who grew up in the era of black and white TV it wasn't half-bad. So I downloaded the whole book and have been reading it desultorily when I'm out on the porch for my daily bowls full. More importantly, it is very good. Well written, passionate and though a wee bit dated as the author himself admits in introductions to the individual essays, no less informative for that. Obviously, Rick's particular passion for the "Great Danes" and his contribution to introducing their work to the American market is front and center in the book. Reading about the Chonowitsch's and Ivarsson's et. al. one learns a lot about the evolution of the contemporary pipe scene, and simultaneously cannot help but be envious, knowing that owning any of these pipes are out of the reach of the likes of me. Pipe Dreams, indeed.



While not strictly speaking on topic, I can't imagine that the subject of whiskey is too far removed from the hearts and taste buds of most pipe smokers. While here, last week my son and son-in-law and I traveled to the Tuthiltown Spirits for a guided tour of the distillery. We were the only one's on the tour. Had a great time, tasted some great whiskeys, and bought a bottle home.

Blogging With Bloggers

An unusual follow up to a post only a day later. With the kids gone and three weeks of rest under my belt I'm game for a bit of loquaciousness. I've had a bit of time to catch up on other pipe/tobacco blogs and web pages, which has been fun, too.

In that regard you may have noticed the tobacco tin-like button on the top left of the side bar. I've joined what I take to be a nascent attempt to unify pipe/tobacco bloggers into one community. If you click on the tin you will be taken to a site featuring a variety of bloggers that you may not have come across before. I certainly hadn't. As one of the first projects of this community we've been asked to click on the tin ourselves and find our listing among the blogs listed and then scroll to the blog listed below our own and introduce it on our own blog. Got that?

Well, always willing to help out, I discovered in this manner Pipe Reflections whose post on Frog Morton tobacco was a lovely reminder of what has now become a classic blend. In addition to describing some of the virtues of the tobacco, the blogger takes us on a bit of a journey through the iconography of pipe smoking frogs. Now, I had never thought about this phenomenon! The truth is that the frog often appears in literature and its accompanying pictures as a pipe smoker. Is this good or bad? Interesting question. I suppose it depends on your view of frogs (and hopefully has nothing to do with their increasing rate of disappearance!) The point is, the blogger does what a good blogger does best: start with the subject that we are all somehow connected by and then takes us to some place we didn't expect. Great blog! I recommend it and will add it to my link list, though now that you can click the Pipe Blogger button that is probably not as necessary anymore.

One word of critique: As I've discovered lately on a number of other blogs there didn't seem to be any "about me" section or if there was I didn't find it. I like knowing something about who is writing; where they live, what they do, how old they are, etc. Are pipe bloggers hiding from something? Let's share real identities, not just virtual ones.

It's Never Too Hot To Smoke

Just for the record: for those of us for whom winter presents nearly insurmountable impediments to enjoying a pipe, you'll never catch me complaining that it's too hot to smoke. Sure, you may sweat a bit, but take a cool drink outside, light up and think about what it was like sitting in the backyard in December and enjoy the smoke.

That said, let me just say that my schedule the last two months of the academic year was overwhelming and all thoughts of blogging went by the wayside. And for the last three weeks I have been ensconced in my Pocono hide away, yes, enjoying an evening smoke regardless of the heat, usually with a nice cool Manhattan and a book. I've been here for three weeks, two and a half of which my children and grandchildren have been here also. It has been great getting to spend that much time with the little ones. And I still managed two read four novels. Now they are gone and Annie and I have about ten days left to ourselves. I expect to get even more reading done and smoke a few more pipes each day than the evening pipe I've allowed myself after the kids have gone to bed.



Started off smoking C&D's Burley Flake Number 3. I loved number 1 so much I thought I'd try the others. Couldn't get number 2 before I left town. Number 3 is every bit as delicious as number 1, but way stronger. When I say a tobacco is difficult for me to finish a bowl because it is too strong, my friends know that that's gotta be one strong tobacco. So much so that it is not possible to use as an everyday smoke. After a really big meat meal its ok, but otherwise, watch out. I decided to let discretion be the better part of valor and went back to number 1 for the majority of the time.