MBSD Meerschaum Premier XL by Bay Pipes Floral Calabash w/ Case & Tamper Block Meerschaum Pipe, New

Since the very beginnings of MBSD Pipes, we’ve prided ourselves on offering high quality meerschaum pipes to our customers. To this end, we’ve always enlisted some of the finest carvers in all of Turkey and made sure that their expertise is appropriately applied to high-grade block meerschaum.

One of the more recent developments with our meers came from a dream that also started at the beginnings of this endeavor, which was something of an “East meets West” project. Though Turkey is famous for its meerschaum carvers, most of these carvers use acrylic mouthpieces for their pipes, as is the standard. While there’s nothing wrong with acrylic mouthpieces, many pipe smokers—especially those accustomed to artisan briars—have a preference for hand-cut ebonite.

Very few meerschaum carvers have experience with ebonite, so in the past we’ve teamed up with briar artisans closer to home to offer limited runs of Turkish-carved meerschaum pipes with American-cut ebonite mouthpieces. In this instance, however, we collaborated with a master meerschaum carver who, due to his particular background, is almost as familiar with ebonite as he is with Eskişehir’s white gold.

That carver is Emre Bay. As a former apprentice to Fikri Baki (who in turn was close with, and learned from, the legendary German artisan Rainer Barbi), Bay has spent decades working with meerschaum, briar, ebonite, and other materials commonly used in pipe making. For the latest batch of MBSD Meerschaum pipes, Bay produced a handful of Premier-line meerschaum pipes for us, with designs based on historic meerschaum pipes from the Ottoman period. Each has been mounted with our patented Briar-Mortise, which provides a strong and secure fitment between the shank and the mouthpiece, and each includes a hand-cut ebonite mouthpiece. As these are rather special pipes, they come in cased sets that also include a hand-carved meerschaum and brass tamper.

These pipes also mark the 20th anniversary of Bay Pipes, honoring two decades of craftsmanship from one of Turkey’s most respected contemporary pipe makers.

Details:

Length: 6.6″ / 167.6mm

Bowl Width: 0.93 / 23.62mm

Bowl Depth: 2.13″ / 54.10mm

Weight: 3.5oz / 102g