William Serad discovered Cornell & Diehl shortly after the company's launch in 1992. He was always looking for new tobaccos, and this fledgling company was intriguing. A skilled industrial data analyst, he enjoyed collecting information on tobaccos and pipes, and collating and analyzing that data for more informed and optimally enjoyable smoking. He would sometimes purchase six iterations of the same pipe to see if they all smoked the same. They didn't. He kept spreadsheets and developed rubrics. He would try every tobacco he could acquire and smoke them in different pipes with different dimensions, different materials, with filters and without, and then do it over again with the tobacco prepared differently, trying to understand how to coax each into its most flavorful potential and best version of itself.

"Sometimes," says William, "tobaccos just need the right smoking instrument in order to speak. So I would just keep trying them in different sizes, bowl shapes, lengths, different, different, just different. And sometimes, they never spoke very well, no matter what I did. Others were immediately good, and it didn't matter what pipe I used."

When William saw an advertisement for Cornell & Diehl, he called Craig Tarler, who founded C&D with his wife Patty. They talked tobacco endlessly. William had lots of ideas that were founded on his experience with and seemingly comprehensive understanding of the interplay of tobacco components.

In the early years, when the company was establishing itself in the pipe community, C&D invested considerable time in custom blending for individuals, and William was especially pleased with that impressive service. He proposed some new formulations. "Craig was just starting the business," says William, "and I was making suggestions, for myself really, and he liked some of them. Over time, I contributed about 40 different recipes; some stayed alive and some came and went." Craig would also modify some of William's mixtures for a wider audience, changing proportions or adding flavorings, which William never considered or had an interest in, and William was fine with that arrangement. He was happy to see some of his ideas reach fruition — so that he could experiment with them.

Perhaps the most famous of his contributions is C&D's Serenity series, which comprises four different blends: Comfort, Consolation, Repose, and Reverie. The names chosen indicate the blends' dedication to the relaxation and stress relief of pipe smoking. "The basis of the Serenity series," says William, "was originally cube-cut Burley." Comfort is a mixture of Perique and Bright Virginias, with a touch of cube-cut Burley and Black Cavendish, and its flavor profile is especially suited to those who enjoy Perique. Consolation combines Latakia, Turkish, and Bright Virginias balanced with Black Cavendish and cube-cut Burley. Repose is an Aromatic blend of cube-cut Burley, Turkish, and Bright Virginias, drizzled with a splash of dark rum. Reverie unifies a mixture of Black Cavendish with cube-cut Burley and a touch of Perique, Latakia, and Turkish.

"I did a series of Virginia blends that won an award at one of the Conclave Of Richmond Pipe Smokers (CORPS) pipe shows, and I did a series from when Craig had that supply of Syrian Latakia. I did six or so Syrian Latakia blends, which of course went by the wayside when the Syrian disappeared. One of them, I thought, was the best thing I ever did. It was called Baalbek. I never named these things. They were just numbers when I sent Craig recipes, and he called that one Baalbek" — named for a city in eastern Lebanon.

"I did six or so Syrian Latakia blends, which of course went by the wayside when the Syrian disappeared"

Apart from collaborating with Greg to create pipe tobaccos, William also mapped the entire C&D lineup, utilizing his career skills to help understand trends and weaknesses within the company's portfolio. "This may be a strange thing, but I make behavioral and mathematical models." That's part of his profession; he started as an econometrician. "I used to do economic forecasting; I worked for a Nobel Laureate at the very beginning, when I was still in school, and I went on to work in marketing areas that used mathematical psychology techniques: Psychometrics. It's basically understanding the way people think about things by collecting survey information or by using behavioral data. You model what they're doing. So an econometrician would look at the economics behavior as a system of equations for pricing and consumption, stuff that you would expect in the 'dismal science,' as it's called. I moved on to other behavioral things that were based on utility theory and stuff like that from the early days of the Scottish moral philosophers and the roots of economics, but it turned into mathematical psychology."

William clearly possessed an unusual skillset, and he was inclined to participate because it interested him. "Craig gave me his entire catalog of products and I mapped them all to see where the weaknesses were. A lot of the things that I was initially developing were to fill in places where there weren't any products. It was a mathematical representation, like an X, Y axis kind of a thing. Some of the quadrants were sparsely populated, and as it turns out, there are good reasons why some products don't exist."

"... as it turns out, there are good reasons why some products don't exist"

For his own amusement and education, William did the same thing with tobacco reviews printed in Pipes and tobaccos magazine, when Kevin Cook was writing them. "I projected his ratings into the brand space of all of the blends," says William, "and the only thing that I found out was that he didn't like white Burley. I couldn't necessarily find what he liked, but I could tell from the models that he did not like white Burley."

I was the magazine's editor at the time. We had no reviewer at first but had found Kevin Cook through his website, The Professor's Pipe Tobacco Reviews, and he agreed to provide reviews for each issue, starting in 1998. Kevin was an excellent reviewer, but by the end of that year he withdrew. That left the magazine with no tobacco reviewer. I immersed myself in TobaccoReviews.com, searching for candidates I might forward proposals to. We went without reviews for an issue in the meantime, but we needed exactly the right person and had not found them.

Craig Tarler and I were on the phone one day. He was probably telling stories or venting about something in that deep booming voice of his, or telling a bad joke or worse: a pun. His jokes were awful, but he was hilarious and I enjoyed our conversations. I may have been venting about finding a good writer who understood tobacco when he said, "I know someone you may be interested in." He introduced me to William, and I asked for some writing samples.

Writing samples are often disappointing but proactively highlight problem areas for improvement; they're more for assessing potential than skill level, but William delivered polished reviews. This guy could write extraordinarily well, and more importantly, his experience and understanding of pipe tobacco was at a level I could not approach. William renamed the review column, "Trial by Fire," and he wrote reviews for P&T for many years to follow.

William delivered polished reviews

"Trial by Fire" was the most popular department with readers by far, though the industry sometimes ruffled a bit. Manufacturers are sensitive to reviews of their products, as they should be, and prefer the most positive assessments possible, as they should prefer. That tobacco review column caused more political strife than we imagined, but we kept going.

William eventually stopped writing reviews on the advice of his doctor. Reviewing tobacco required more tobacco consumption than was good for the condition he was dealing with at the time. However, William continued writing articles and a regular pipe column. He spent almost 20 years helping the magazine, until it ceased publication. Among the most prolific and talented contributors to P&T, his work helped define its reputation.

Early Pipe Smoking

Both of William's grandfathers were pipe smokers, but no other family members. In fact, "my mother's father was a model for Half and Half, believe it or not." William attended the University of Pennsylvania for his undergraduate and graduate work, and previously earned a B.A. while attending high school, which is unusual, but he's pretty smart. He started pipe smoking while in college. "A friend of mine was interested in pipes and bought one, and then I became interested. I was a Sherlock Holmes fan, so I went to the Philadelphia Tobacco Shop, on Chestnut Street. My first pipe was a Calabash, which is of course how all beginning pipe smokers start off. Then I discovered how totally impractical it is. It's not like it's convenient to carry."

"My first pipe was a Calabash, which is of course how all beginning pipe smokers start off"

He remembers his first tobacco vividly, a store-blend called Adam's Choice. "It was one of those American English blends with a Burley base, Virginias, a smattering of Orientals, Latakia, and maybe a little Perique. It was a classic, something someone probably developed in the '40s, but it was the biggest seller at the store. The world had not switched over to Aromatics at that point, so the things that sold were mainly reminiscent of the '30s, '40s, and '50s."

The availability of such classic blends helped William avoid some of the problems that new pipe smokers often experience. "I have never developed that one-blend fascination that many people have. I've gone through cycles of particular interest, though. After Adam's Choice, I tried Aromatics and found them to be, well, back then they tended to taste terrible because they were made of low-quality leaf with goop added, generally. Then I discovered heavy, heavy Balkans, and then cleansed my palate with — maybe everybody goes through this cycle — Virginia flakes and Virginia/Periques. And, that's where I just kind of stayed for a long time, but I drifted back."

The Pipes of William Serad

William says that he never buys only one pipe by a particular maker. "I buy three, just to see if there's anything there. At one point, a friend gave me a Jobey Stromboli. They were very craggy-looking, black pipes and they had very brilliantly colored Lucite stems. Then I bought him one for his birthday. Then he bought me another one, and I bought him another one, and I ended up with 13 of them. And what I discovered was that every third one was a very good smoker and the others were not so terrific. It was interesting to look at the statistical probability of it being a great pipe or an okay pipe or otherwise." Because of his experimental nature, which requires the accumulation of multiple data points (or pipes, as we pedestrians call them), his collection has grown large over the years.

"I bought 10 Kirstens to try all the different shapes. I was trying the different finishes and bowls to see how they performed. As it turned out, once they got to a certain size, the performance was similar for them. But I had to run the experiment. That's why I have 10 Kirstens: essentially to collect the data on them. I have a bunch of Upshalls, too, which I find to be exceptionally good performers with flake tobaccos, both straight Virginias and Virginia/Periques. I have a bunch of Ashtons, which are high performers, I think. I still want to run some more data on them. But what I found interesting was that price was orthogonal to performance."

That's why I have 10 Kirstens: essentially to collect the data on them

I had to interrupt him there. I'm interested in words. I collect them. "Orthogonal" was not in my collection.

"It means uncorrelated or unrelated. I have tremendously cheap pipes that are terrific and I have some expensive pipes that are total duds. And there are some funny things along the way, too. I have a Dunhill that used to be very nice, but it was re-stemmed and is now among the hottest-smoking pipes I have. Just from changing the stem. I do not understand, but one of these days I'll have another stem made."

He is especially attracted to the Bulldog shape and has many. "And a lot of Petersons." He needed all those pipes, and the more the better. "I was exploring the boundaries of what they were like." Unfortunately, universal conclusions remain elusive. What he mostly learned is that it's easy to fill a single-family home with pipes. "My daughter says that if you open any drawer in my library, you'll find pipes. I don't think that's true, but there's a grain of truth in all humor."

it's easy to fill a single-family home with pipes

Serad and Tobacco

By the time William started writing for P&T, he'd "tried nine billion blends. I was obsessive. Never have I fixated on anything the way I did with pipe tobacco." Particularly exhilarating were the surprises. "There were things along the way that startled me," he says.

"I used to go to Holt's in Philadelphia, which had the largest humidified room for cigars in North America at the time, but they had quite a lot of pipes, too, and just about every tobacco you could imagine. It was the place to go. I was working downtown and one day realized that I had never tried Escudo, for whatever reason, so I went and picked up a tin. It was time to try Escudo. I used to walk around at lunchtime, and I would puff or sit in the park when you could still do that, and I lit up a bowl of Escudo.

"It was so overwhelmingly good that I could not believe it. I sat down and I had a two-hour lunch, sitting there on somebody's steps in the center of the city of Philadelphia. I'm surprised I wasn't arrested: 'Who's this weird guy sitting on our steps, smoking a pipe?' But the experience was just astonishing; it floored me; it was unbelievably good. That was one of those startling kinds of occasions."

Tobacco Reviews

William continued his self-education on tobacco as he wrote for P&T, sometimes reluctantly, depending on the tobacco he was reviewing. "I smoked things I would not necessarily have willingly smoked; things I wouldn't have necessarily picked up, because my taste had drifted. And since each issue's reviews focused on a dozen or so tobaccos from a single manufacturer, I was obliged to go through all of them. The drug store blends: They've improved immeasurably. They are just significantly better now than they were when I reviewed some of them. I remember one in particular: Holiday. It was awful. It was so awful, it was inconceivable. I couldn't get over it. I didn't know why anybody would smoke it. It tasted like burning dirt, just terrible. And it stank. It had no agreeable characteristics whatsoever." Although William knows that these mixtures improved, he never revisited Holiday, even in Sutliff's startlingly superior matched version. The wounds are too deep.

In stark contrast were G.L. Pease tobaccos, which William particularly appreciated. "Pease has the unique faculty of making blends that develop over time. They are not static tasting, they move. They are in motion down the bowl, which is an amazing thing to me. He did it repeatedly. It wasn't like it was just one blend that did that. Most of his English blends are flavors in motion.

"Pease has the unique faculty of making blends that develop over time"

"Pease's Orientals will gain ascendance and then fade, or you'll get a growing level of sweetness from the Virginias." Each bowl is a dance of flavors revolving around each other, one gaining prominence and then sliding aside for another component to perform. "All of the G.L. Pease English blends that I've tried have that kind of movement. I can't think of anybody else who does that. I used to think, when I ran across phenomena, that it was just sensory fatigue. You can't keep tasting the same thing. But I don't think that's the case with Pease's blends, and I really don't know whether that's an objective of his, or whether it's just a faculty of his, or a characteristic of what he does, but I find it to be true."

William wrote a wide variety of articles for P&T in addition to his columns. His columns were often about tobacco, but he delved into Sherlock Holmes' pipes and various other pipes. The piece he remembers most fondly was about pipe smoking and the cello, perhaps because William plays cello. "Of course, Pablo Casals was a pipe smoker. When they were refurbishing his cello, they found pipe ashes in it, and it still smelled like pipe tobacco because he smoked constantly. In fact, there's a picture of him playing and he's smoking a pipe while he's playing the cello with the Czech Philharmonic. An amazing feat, right? I can barely pay attention enough to the music, let alone anything else going on. And Bach was a pipe smoker, so the confluence of the Bach cello suites and Casals, who was the one who reintroduced them to the world as a performance piece, was all just too good a series of things."

Everywhere throughout the pipe community are people who have focused their individual talents to be as involved with pipes as possible. Pipes become important to all sorts of folks: engineers, photographers, writers, metalworkers, carvers, farmers, designers, and craftspeople of all kinds employ their experience and find a place in our community from which to contribute. William Serad has concentrated on unraveling the mysteries of pipes and tobaccos for almost 50 years, and applied the tools of his unusual profession to pursue his curiosity. He's a talented writer, an insightful developer of tobaccos, an extraordinary reviewer, a thorough researcher, and a friendly and interesting gentleman who for decades has enhanced our understanding of our favorite hobby — and done so with his own style.