Glenn Tinsky Pipes

Glenn Tinsky continues the pipe-making tradition of his father, Mark, but his journey to the craft was different than most. For 17 years, Glenn worked in the culinary arts as a chef, a sommelier, and a restaurant manager after graduating from culinary school. Since then, he's transitioned that artistry and hands-on skill to the world of pipes.

With a pipe maker for a father and a painter for a mother, Glenn's world was saturated with aspects of design, line, and color at an early age, instilling in him an innate compositional understanding. Growing up with artistically gifted parents who both worked from home certainly nurtured Glenn's artistic and creative talents, and his career as a chef also brought its benefits. For years, cooking was his art form, and within that milieu, there are variables that need balancing and need to fit together — not unlike the confluence of briar grain, shaping, finishing, and acrylic or vulcanite or other materials. Whether working with a fine cut of meat and fresh vegetables or with quality briar and stems, for Glenn, it's about balance and harmony, cohesion between the various elements.

As a pipe maker, Glenn draws on the shaping aesthetic of his father, as well as of other pipe makers around the world. While Mark often focuses on English- and Italian-style shapes, Glenn incorporates Danish design cues as well, inspired especially by the work of Tom Eltang and including similar design elements in his work while maintaining his own creative outlook. Glenn appreciates simple shapes that prioritize proportional balance and harmonious lines, and such an aesthetic preserves a sense of the English and Italian traditions but with the refinement and elegance seen across the work of many Danish and Danish-inspired artisans.

All of Glenn's pipes are handcrafted from Grecian briar, and he fits them with pre-formed stems of Italian acrylic that he modifies for optimal smoking performance and to fit the specific shape. Regarding his nomenclature, Glenn stamps his pipes with his name and the year they were made, and his smooth and sandblasted pipes are graded in ascending order by their number of star stamps, ranging from zero to five based on a combination of the briar block's cleanliness and the quality of the grain, as well as how well the briar accepts the finish.