Merchant Service Partially Sandblasted Lovat Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Merchant Service was, originally, a midcentury British pipe brand founded by Herbert Merchant, and is today most remembered for manufacturing the pencil-shank billiard pipes favored by Bing Crosby. As with so many pipe companies of days gone by, Herbert Merchant Inc. was ultimately dissolved, with the Merchant Service story seemingly coming to a close—until something quite special happened. The Merchant Service name was purchased by another pipe maker—this time an American artisan and Anglophile—named Gregory Polla. Polla’s love for not only the classic “Bing” model, but English pipe design more generally, led him to revive Merchant Service pipes. This he does as a “one-man factory” crafting limited runs of iconic, traditional shapes in his personal workshop.

This particular Merchant Service comes from one of Polla’s more recent, limited batches of another classic English shape: the Lovat. In Polla’s words it is a shape that is “sleek yet sturdy, delicate but not fragile,” and it is one that is deceptively difficult to get right in terms of proportions. I’d say Polla nailed it with his own interpretation, here seen dressed in a copper-toned, slight contrast sandblast and adorned with a solid nickel collar.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating.

Details:

Length: 6.1″ / 154.9mm

Bowl Width: 0.73 / 18.54mm

Bowl Depth: 1.41″ / 35.81mm

Weight: 1.3oz / 38g