Charles Cole Smooth Brandy w/ Boxwood Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Given Charles Cole’s background, it’s of little surprise that he would end up making pipes sooner or later. Coming from a long line of tobacco farmers, Cole’s first job was working out in the fields of Kentucky, where he learned to plant, harvest, and cure his family’s crops before he was even a teenager. Still, it would be much later in Cole’s life that he focused his labors on smoking instruments. In the 2000s, amidst an American pipe making renaissance, Cole would meet and befriend figures such as Brad Pohlmann, Todd Johnson, and Bruce Weaver, spending time in their respective workshops receiving valuable instruction on the makings of a good pipe. Cole would indeed go on to make very good pipes, rising through the ranks of the American artisan scene and occupying a position among its highest echelons. Cole has, however, long since stepped away from pipe making, making his works an increasingly rare and valuable find.

As in painting, along with many other forms of art or craft, the relationship between teachers and students can look a lot like the passing on of genes between parents and their offspring. The latter are never identical to the former, but something nonetheless subsists, especially as far as appearances go. With a pipe like this one, it’s not difficult to see that kind of connection between it and the pipes of one of Charles Cole’s mentors, Todd Johnson, and by extension Johnson’s own mentor, Lars Ivarsson. I’d even go so far as to call this something of a “Lars shape”; though ostensibly a brandy, it has that same signature musculature of Lars’s pipes, from its hefty bowl, to its slightly conical shank, to the distinctive stepping of its saddle stem, and to the gracefulness of its overall figure despite the assertiveness of its constitutive parts. At the same time, it is by no means identical to, nor “derivative” of, Lars’s pipes—or Johnson’s, for that matter. It is simply an exemplary expression of the “genes” such masters propagated in the contemporary high-grades scene.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating. It comes with its original leather sleeve.

 

Details:

Length: 6.5″ / 165.1mm

Bowl Width: 0.85 / 21.59mm

Bowl Depth: 1.55″ / 39.37mm

Weight: 2.8oz / 80g