I had the pleasure of chatting with Josh Burgess, Vice President of Manufacturing, recently about his first pipe story. Every pipe smoker has one, whether it's simple or silly. Josh's curiosity for the pipe began as a child, and he used his creativity and his surroundings to start his journey into pipe smoking, albeit a bit unconventionally.

First Exposure to Pipes

Josh's earliest memories of pipes stem from when his father smoked one for a brief period of time. "It's one of those fading childhood memories," says Josh, "and it couldn't have lasted very long." He found a pipe in a drawer — what he remembers as either a Dublin or Zulu — with a yellow bowl, this bowl was a gimmick that was popular at the time. "I know in retrospect that he never smoked it because it was still yellow inside. But I found that little pipe, and I was a child, so I took it outside and I filled it with hay, because we lived on a farm." After lighting it on fire, the experience was, of course, abysmal.

The only other real exposure to pipe smoking he had was through his great uncle, his grandmother's brother, who had a horse farm. "I spent a lot of time with him, and he taught me how to ride. He was sort of a grandfather figure to me. At the end of every night, when he was cleaning up the barn, he always lit a pipe." Although Josh doesn't remember what kind of pipe it was exactly, he notes that it looked a bit like a Peterson. "I don't know what he smoked, but it may have been Middleton Cherry and the aroma was great. It was an end-of-day ritual for him. It just seemed like a really cool thing that he did, and so I had this interest in pipe smoking."

As a young adult, this fascination continued, leading to his first pipe (and cigar) experience during his college years.

Josh's First Pipe

Josh attended a small United Methodist-related liberal arts college called Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. Sadly, it closed about two years ago due to not enough enrollees and dwindling endowments.

While he was a student there, he had an interest in pipe smoking. His friends were more interested in cigars at the time, so they all went to buy some from a local grocery store. "They all chose very sensible Robustos or smaller, and I chose a really large Double Churchill. This was my first cigar." Back at campus, they all went down to smoke them on the academic quad. Josh finished his large cigar in just 35 minutes, leading to him not feeling well. "I didn't even make it back to my dorm room. I had to stop somewhere along the way and lay myself down on a bench. So that was a really rough night." For Josh, the cigar thing didn't work out, and this bad experience cured his interest. "I thought, well, maybe a pipe is the way to go."

For most college students, the budget is tight, which was the case for Josh. But he was determined nonetheless to procure a pipe. "I had a change jar that I'd kept since childhood, and I thought, gosh, there must be a decent amount of money in there. So I dumped it out on my dorm room bed, and I counted it all out, and it came to the princely sum of $69." He had enough to buy a pipe. He turned the loose change into cash and went down to a local tobacco shop with a friend, which was the first dedicated pipe shop he ever visited.

The shop had an array of pipes. "I found this tray labeled Wessex, and they all looked very classic. My friend bought a bent Billiard with a tapered stem. I bought a bent Billiard with a saddle stem." There were several different brands and factories that manufactured Wessex, and Josh picked up one of their Italian-made pieces.

They both also picked up tobacco — a bulk blend — and were very pleased with themselves. "We went back to campus, and we were too embarrassed to smoke our pipes on the academic quad. There was this little gazebo down by the parking lot, away from everything, that we went to so we couldn't be seen, because neither of us knew what we were doing. We didn't know how to pack a pipe. We just kind of stuffed some tobacco in there, lit it on fire, and hoped for the best."

Josh's friend didn't care for it, and he can't quite remember what that first smoke was like. "It was probably really awful, but it was interesting. It was an interesting way to pass the time. I kept sneaking down to that gazebo about once a week until I finally learned how to keep the thing lit."

After practicing, he got enough confidence to smoke on the quad while reading a book. There were other people on campus who smoked pipes, though they were professors who were a tier above in his mind, so he didn't approach them. Instead, he figured it out on his own, and pipe smoking became easier.

"I do remember the day I realized that the pipe came apart when I dropped it and the stem twisted. I had no idea. I guess I just thought stem and shank were fused together." At that point, he had had that Wessex pipe for about a year and smoked it regularly. He learned, upon pulling it apart, that it had a 9mm filter — unchanged with use — filled with what he refers to as a "gruesome black paste." After dumping it out, he thinks he bought a pipe cleaner to clean it out. "Life got better when I bought a second pipe and was able to work it into some kind of little rotation."

Tobacco Evolution

For the first 10 years, Josh didn't realize there were other kinds of tobacco other than Aromatics sold in big jars, because that was all he saw. "I started going to a nicer pipe shop in Birmingham, and they had tobacco in tins, but it struck me as very expensive, so I never bought it." As a college student, the most he could scrape together was $2.50 for an ounce of bulk tobacco.

"Around 2006, someone mailed me a tin of Astley's 109. I opened it up and it was a flake tobacco. I didn't even know what it was or how to deal with it." He wasn't aware that it was called flake, until he searched "tobacco in chunks," or something similar, and learned that it was called that. He also learned that it needed to be rubbed out. "I smoked that and I thought, this is really something special and something different. It was not a heavily aromatic tobacco."

Eventually, when he was living in Columbia, South Carolina, he asked a worker in a tobacco shop for something that wasn't sweet. "I didn't have the vocabulary to ask for anything else. He pointed me toward the tins, and I bought a tin of McClellan No. 24 and Dunhill Nightcap."

He took a real liking to the English blends. "They were more naturally flavored than any of the sweet stuff I'd been smoking. But they also gave me a lot of flavor. They didn't require the same level of sophistication that I would later think that a Virginia tobacco needed, so they were both accessible and interesting. I stuck with those for a good few years."

For about five to 10 years following this switch to English blends, he smoked every tobacco he could get his hands on, especially once he started working at Smokingpipes. "Every week, I would go down to the warehouse and I would buy a new tin just to try something different. 10 years later, I'm out of that. I smoke Haunted Bookshop pretty much exclusively. I really like Burleys and Virginias now, and pretty much any Virginia or Virginia/Perique from C&D. I'm currently smoking Opening Night."

Impact of Pipe Smoking on Josh's Life

Beyond eventually bringing him to Smokingpipes, the hobby has impacted him in profound ways his college-aged self was unable to grasp at the time. "Even then, I sensed that there was something in this hobby that was aspirational for me. Pipe smoking seemed reminiscent of a way of life that we were losing."

He finds it humorous that although he learned to smoke a pipe in secret, hiding down by the gazebo in the parking lot, it became something that connected him to the people around him. "I couldn't smoke in my dorm room — I did try to dry out some pipe tobacco once in the microwave, and it caught on fire and set the fire alarms off in the dorm. That was great fun — so it forced me to go outside." Since it was quite odd to see a person smoking a pipe at school, people would approach him as he read and smoked to chat with him. "It slowed me down, it got me out into the world, and it was observational. I don't think I understood any of that at the time, but it was giving me something I needed, and it still does."

Advice for First Pipes

As for advice he would give to a newcomer searching for the first pipe in their journey, Josh recommends keeping it affordable and enjoying the process. "Buy the best pipe you can afford. If that's a $69 Wessex, that's fine. Go for it. And be gentle with yourself. Enjoy the process, and try to keep out of your head that there's a right way to do this. Don't over-intellectualize it. Don't read every blog. Don't watch every YouTube video. Go outside, turn your phone off, and relax."

That is Josh's first pipe story. I'd love to hear your first-pipe story in the comments below. Feel free to share, and hopefully that can provide even more inspiration for those who are looking to get started. If you missed Shane Ireland's and Andy Wike's previous stories, check them out!