hey everyone eddie gray here with thepipenook.com this is part 5 in my video series of how to smoke pipe and we're going to be talking about preparing your tobacco this is just going to be a real quick video kind of a public service announcement just a reminder that um pipe tobacco and this is where some people fall off the train pipe tobacco uh requires a little bit more care and attention than cigars are definitely cigarettes you can't just grab it and light it and go unless you've checked and made sure that the moisture content is is is okay you can smoke tobacco a little bit on the moist side you can smoke it a little bit on the dry side but i wouldn't recommend that you smoke it bone dry or super wet excess moisture in the tobacco blend can create excess vapor in the smoke and when that vapor superheats that's what causes tongue bite if you've ever heard of or experienced tongue bite it's not pleasant so that's kind of the point of this video series is to avoid the pitfalls of pipe smoking one of the major ones being tongue bite so what you want to do is get yourself a tobacco mat like i mentioned uh in the accessories video or a paper plate paper plate works just as well or you know silver platter whatever you want some sort of surface to put your tobacco on and what i will do is put more tobacco than i know i need to put in a pipe and then i can just kind of pinch off from here when i go to load it but you want it to sit on this mat or on your plate for long enough for it to to get most of the excess moisture to come out of it um you know 10 minutes is kind of a good rule of thumb but that's really bare minimum uh depending on how moist or how wet your tobacco is you know it could take 30 minutes to an hour or even longer so just kind of bear that in mind um i don't always practice what i preach when it comes to this but what i wind up doing is before i put items in mason jars i kind of let the tobacco air out once i've cracked a town before i put it in here so i know by and large that's going to be pretty good to to load up straight out of the jar should i choose to do that so um you don't want your tobacco to be crackly and you don't want it to be goopy all right we'll leave it at that and uh we'll come back with the next video which is going to be how to load your pipe i believe that's part six all right we'll talk to you soon