smoking a pipe can be a relaxing and enjoyable hobby and there's no reason it shouldn't be hey everybody I'm Eric and today I'm tea and tobacco I'm going to show you how to smoke a pipe now right off the bat I do want to say that there's a slight learning curve when it comes to smoking a pipe that's not as straightforward as a cigar or cigarette where you just light it and go there is a little bit more maintenance that you have to do while you're smoking a pipe I don't want you to get overwhelmed by that and I also don't want your first few smoking experiences to taint any future enjoyment that you may get from smoking a pipe everybody's first few times smoking can be a little frustrating just because it's it's something new and you just kind of have to get used to it and learn and there's a little bit of figuring out as you go but hopefully the information and tips in this video can help you move along a little faster all right so right off the bat you're gonna need a few things obviously you're going to need a pipe now I will make a video in the future on selecting your first pipe but right now I will say get something semi decent this is actually the first pipe I ever bought this is a bribe eeeh golden extra I paid about $85 I believe for it now I know basket pipes and corn cobs can be attractive because of their low price but they may not provide the best smoking experience especially for the first time now spending you know eighty to ninety dollars may sound like a lot right off the bat especially if you're not sure if you're going to continue smoking but if you buy something like this or a Peterson or 7le or an ordinate price range you can easily resell it on eBay for 70 to 80 percent of its value even if it's been smoked five to ten times so I would definitely go and try to get something semi decent eighty to ninety dollar price range is pretty good you'll get something relatively decent so that's what I have to say about picking out of your first pipe and I'll go in the future detail in a different video alright so you're gonna need a pipe you're going to need a pipe tool this is the most common one you'll see this is called a check pipe tool because it's Man Czech Republic they're about one to two dollars this one is a little fancier really all you're looking for is you need a tamper which is a splat piece here and you're going to need a spike or sometimes call the pick or nail you're also going to need a soft flame lighter or matches I would suggest matches for your first time and I will make a video in the future on why you're going to need some tobacco I am using a ribbon cut tobacco because one ease of packing and two it is the overall majority of tobacco's out there that you're going to find or going to be in this format of make a video in the future on different cuts of tobacco and how to pack them you're also going to want an ashtray this is just a cigar ashtray Rhett really any ashtray will do and you're also going to need some pipe cleaners yes they are not just for making crafts in kindergarten but don't get the craft ones because you don't want little neon fuzzies in your pipe and these ones are actually made for pipes and then lastly it's optional but I prefer to use a piece of paper when I'm packing my pipes because then all the stuff that happens to fall on the table is easy to either put back into the top of my pipe or back into the jar that it came from alright so the first thing we need to do is we need to pack white so here I have my pipe in my tobacco quickly I want to talk about making sure that you have the right moisture content in your tobacco and there's an easy way to do it it's called a pinch or squeeze test so what you're gonna want to do is take some tobacco in your hand and then squeeze it between your fingers and when you let go it should start to expand on its own and kind of fall back apart now if you squeeze it and it crunches and turns into dust your tobacco is way too dry and you're gonna have to add moisture back into your tobacco don't make a separate video on that and if you if you squeeze it and it stays intact into that ball and doesn't expand or even worse if water comes out of it your tobacco is way too moist and you're gonna have to let it dry out a little bit until it gets down into that zone where it starts to fall apart after you release the pressure all right so I'm going to be using what's called the gravity method or the lair method or the 3-step method it's all different names for exactly the same thing so basically what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to lightly put tobacco into the pipe and then you can compress it in multiple layers so the first time I find that I'm usually compressing it to about halfway down the bowl and then the next time is halfway between the top and the previous layer and then the last time same so it's basically going half half half until you have the bowl filled a lot of times you'll hear it called the three-step method but but depending on the size of your pipe it could be two it could be four or five depending it you might have a huge pipe I have a little pipe that's up there that I definitely need to do four sometimes five layers alright so this is how you do it so what you want to do you just want to basically lightly let gravity take some tobacco into the pipe that's why it's that's what I call the gravity method or the layer method and I'm going to pack this down to about halfway down the bolt and then I'm going to let gravity do its work bang again and then pack it halfway between the top and the previous layer and again put tobacco in the pipe and compress it down and this is going to sit pretty close to the top as you can see each time I put it on I put you know over the top so you kind of get a little bit extra more than halfway so there you go you can kind of compress it with your thumb you can give it a little twist some people like to do it just to kind of intertwine some of the layers I usually don't but gets the job done so there we go we are pretty much ready to smoking oh and here's the reason why I usually have a piece of paper as you can see I had a bunch that was falling out obviously I started with someone the page but now it's easy enough where I can fold this over and get it in and then I can easily dump it back into my jar all right so now that you have your pipe packed give it a little test draw you're looking for a little bit of resistance I like mine at about a thin milkshake through a straw if it's packed way too tight and you can't draw air through just take your pipe tool with the nail scoop out the tobacco and just repack it if it is too loose and you have like no resistance at all you can just add a little bit more tobacco and give it a little bit stiffer compression all right so now that you're have your pipe ready to go here you can move on to lighting now lighting is usually a two-step process you're going to light at once which is called the false light or the charring light because as soon as you touch heat to this this compressed tobacco is going to want to expand and decompress and that ends up making go out what you'll do after that you'll take your tamper and you'll basically recompress that top layer and then you'll light it again which is called the true light sometimes you will get a second false light don't worry about it it's not a huge deal if it happens you just tap down the top again and then light your pipe all right so I'm going to be using matches a quick thing about matches you're going to want to let these sulfur burn off before you touch to the top of the tobacco so here we go light up definitely these software's burned off this point and now what you're going to want to do you're going to want to move it in a circular motion while taking short draws on your pipe all right now you can see I have some tobacco that's come up out of the bowl during this first lighting so what I'm going to do I'm going to take my tamper and tamp it back down to where it was and of course it's gone out not a big deal perfectly normal and what happens pretty much every time so I'll light my second one let this all four burn off and basically the same thing you want to move it around in a circular motion well taking short puffs on your pipe I had a little more expansion so I'm actually going to tamp this while drawing and hopefully that will keep it lit all right and away you go now the goal of smoking a pipe is just to get cool smoke into your mouth so you can enjoy the flavor and then you exhale it out now you can let it remain in your mouth longer you can do it short you can just let it flow out on its own you can press it out with your with your lungs anyway is really up to you one thing you're going to want to take very slow draws through this because you want to keep this as cool as possible if it gets too hot then basically to the tobacco starts tasting like ash and burnt material now I know it's lit but it's kind of a misnomer what you're looking for is you want to smolder now one thing if your bowl starts getting really warm it could be a sign that you're smoking too fast and you just need to give it a slight rest the basically the test is if you can hold the bowl against your cheek for five seconds and you're perfectly comfortable doing that then you're okay if it is too hot to do that just say your pipe down let it cool down a little bit and then you can relight and keep going now quick word about relights relighting is not a huge deal if your pipe goes out it it's a common occurrence it's nothing - it's nothing that you did wrong per se you know like I'm talking right now so I'm not taking a whole lot of drawers so each time it's been almost going out when I finally do get around to that as you can see I haven't kind of thin smoke so it's starting to go out on me which is perfectly fine I prefer to do a relight then try to puff on it really fast and try to get it going again cuz then you end up just getting heated up and ends up tasting burnt that's not something I want alright so now you can go ahead and keep smoking once in a while you're going to want it as a layer of ash builds up on top of your tobacco you're going to want to take your tamper and kind of knock the ash down into the tobacco that's there yeah I mean you'll feel like no resistance when you're pressing through the ash and you just want to put it and rest it against the top at the tobacco so it's pretty much gone out on me not a big deal I've tapped it down and then I can go ahead and relight it again all right so you're smoking along now if you starts drawing too hard on this there's a possibility of getting a thing called tongue bite now that's usually when hot smoke ends up hitting your tongue and it actually feels like a prickly or burning sensation now that is a sign that you can be smoking too quickly or you might have just a weird bit placement and you might just want to just move your bed a little bit and into the air space above your tongue and below the roof of your mouth behind your teeth and that can usually help out a little bit also another trick is loosen your lips a little bit when you're drawing on your pipe so you get some fresh air that doesn't go through the pipe and then that can help cool the smoke down just enough by that mixing action to prevent that from happening also if your smoke starts tasting a little burnt you can also try that loosing your lips and getting that fresh air it can some kind of sweeten up the smoke for you because it's gonna cool it down give you a better flavor all right so once you get down to about a third or a quarter of the bull left you may find it hard to keep it lit now there's a couple things you can do you can take your pipe tool and you can take the spike and just kind of loosen up the top layer of ash and then dump that out that will expose the top layer of tobacco and you may be able to just relight from there you can use your tamper to kind of flatten it out before you do that also after that if you still can't get it lit but you still want to keep smoking you can take your pick and basically mix up the whole thing and repack it what's left with your tamper and you can relight that usually at that point is actually when I'll just stop smoking it because it starts to taste kind of burnt and I'm not a big fan of that end of a bull flavor anyways there are some tobacco's that you can go all the way down to the bottom of the bowl and they taste great but I find that more of the exception than so once you get to that point and you decide that you're done smoking what you're gonna want to do you're gonna want to take your pipe tool and basically scoop out whatever remaining ash and tobacco is left and then you're gonna want to take a pipe cleaner and just run it down the stem as far as it will go and then pull it out and that will soak up some of the moisture that's in there now what then what you're gonna want to do you're gonna want to set this down to let it cool you never want to remove this stem from the bowl while this is warm that will start to loosen the connection and you don't want that because then it won't actually sit in here anymore alright so you'll just put this away and once it's cooled down then you'll do the final step of cleaning alright so here's a pipe that I have recently smoked it's been sitting on my to be cleaned rack I don't clean all my pipes right away I usually let a few build up and then I will clean them all together at once the first thing you're going to want to do is you're gonna want to remove the stem from the pipe take a pipe cleaner and run it through the stem sometimes you guys go both ways depending on how bent it is this one's relatively clean then you're gonna want to take a pipe cleaner and run it through the shank down into the bowl since this is a bent pipe usually I can't get a pipe cleaner through the stem all the way into the bowl if you can't do that sometimes you don't have to bother removing the stem this is pretty clean as well and the last thing I do I'll make a little u-shape with this and I will run it down into the inside of my bowl and it kind of gets a little bit of the excess dust and gunk out of there and really that's the minimal steps of cleaning I just put the stem back on and you can throw it back onto your smoking rack it is recommended that you let pipes sit for at least 24 hours preferably 48 to let them dry out and air out you don't want all that moisture to build up into the wood it affects the smoke a little bit so that's why I have a lot of people have more than one pipe because if you have to let it sit around for 24 hours music can't be smoking any time soon so there you go how to smoke a pipe hopefully this video has been helpful for you if you have any questions feel free to leave them down below in the comment section and I will get to them as quick as possible or if the topic is video worthy I may make a video about that topic as always be sure to give it a like and subscribe and I will see you next time on tea and tobacco see you guys I'm gonna talk about a problem that we all run into now and then which is excess moisture buildup inside of our pipes which then ends up causing the gurgling so quickly I'm just going to go through the top causes of gurgling and then I'll go into more detail about them and ways you can fix them