Haunted Pipes: Pipe Ghosts and how to Bust them

If you’ve been smoking for a while you may be familiar with pipe ghosts. For those unfamiliar, a pipe ghost is a pesky aftertaste that lingers in and haunts your pipes with its supernatural flavor—in other words they have a chance at possessing and at times permanently ruining your favorite pipe. So how can we bust these ghosts? Unfortunately the best way to avoid these ghosts is to ensure your pipe isn’t haunted in the first place. To ensure your pipe doesn’t wind up with a  lingering flavor, the first step is to limit your smoking contents to pipe tobacco—smoking anything other than pipe tobacco in your briar wood pipe will leave, at least for a time, a flavor rather contrary to the flavor of tobacco, and it may be a while before you can smoke without an odd undercurrent of flavor present. Depending on the substance, smoking anything other than tobacco in your pipe may ruin its flavor forever.

But lets say you recently smoked a very flavorful tobacco and find its taste lingering on your next bowl. The best methods we’ve discovered for avoiding tobacco ghosts is to ensure you smoke the bowl all the way to the bottom, and keep a tidy cake in your bowl. To smoke the bowl to the bottom is just what it implies—when smoking, try not to stop halfway through the bowl if you can, and ensure you finish each bowl you pack for a session. This will ensure you build an even cake in your pipe, and prevent stray tobacco leaves from sticking to the bowls bottom, and perhaps contributing to ghost flavors in your pipe. Similarly, controlling your cake is simply to manage cake build up. Every so often, you’ll want to carve down your cake a bit by using your tamper or pipe tool to evenly scrape off some of your layered cake build up, to ensure it doesn’t get too thick.

These tips should help you avoid a pipe ghost, every now and then however one slips through. If your ghost is a tobacco ghost, your pipe will likely bounce back at some point. If you’ve made the mistake of smoking something other than pipe tobacco in your pipe however, we‘re afraid it’s most likely time to say farewell to your old pipe.