By New Year’s Day, everyone has made a number of New Year Resolution they swear they will keep all year. By January 2, they have ignored those resolutions. This year I made a resolution to not be like everyone else. I resolved to only make pipe smoking resolutions that I know I will or can keep. (Since this is 2018, …
Hats (Part I): Are you covered…. Most people may not realize it, or think it’s something made up for Hollywood movies, but wearing hats used to be an everyday occurrence for men. Long before the popularity of ball caps, men used to wear Bowlers, Fedora’s, flat caps and cowboy hats as part of their daily clothing. Now it has become …
Pappy’s Rules for hats… The following rules have nothing to do with the etiquette of wearing hats that I mentioned in “Where have all the hats gone…” In fact, what follows are not rules per se, but more guidelines that I believe in. Rule 1. Everyone can wear a hat but every hat doesn’t “fit” every wearer or occasion. There …
It happens after Thanksgiving every year. Mrs. Pappy Claus and I start our annual Christmas gift shopping and people stop and look twice or thrice at me. One time, we were eating lunch and a nice lady stopped by our table and said, “My grandson saw him and said, “Look! Santa’s eating lunch but that’s not Mrs. Claus!” She also …
Newminster No. 23 Blackberry Brandy It’s cooler in Southeast Louisiana with temperatures dropping into the 40s and 50s at night and the leaves on the red maple in my front yard turned red and dropped to the ground. Even the oak trees in the neighborhood are doing the same. I have smelled the smoke from fire places and fire pits. …
The Thanksgiving Smoke… Whilst sitting and contemplating what I will be smoking today, I have these thoughts… There are a lot of things I have to be thankful for. I am thankful that I survived a childhood before the advent of video games and electronic devices. I survived a childhood where we played outside – sometimes from daybreak to after …
Solani Blend 127 I opened the tin and knew immediately that I liked Solani Green Blend 127 – Green. Its an appetizing blend of black cavendish and light and dark brown tobaccos. It contains some finely chopped, some ribbon and some more like shredded leaf. Then I looked it up on tobaccoreviews.com and saw that it’s actually made by Kohlhase …
Living and fishing in SE Louisiana you learn one thing fast: It’s more fun and productive when it’s cooler. This was reinforced often during the 10 years I spent as editor of Louisiana Outdoors from 1995 to 2005. Just about every charter fishing captain I worked with or wrote about, had three or four months out of the year …
It is apparent that some people read too much into pipe tobacco names. In fact, they actually expect and demand to taste a specific flavor based on the name printed on the tin or bag. It is also apparent that sometimes people who name a pipe tobacco often sit down and start drinking until they either pass out or a …
I believe there are three different types of tobacco blenders in the world. First are the Professional Blenders. These are blenders who make their living by mixing different varieties of tobacco into the commercially available pipe tobacco we buy. They are blenders like Joe Lankford, Russ Oulette, Craig Tarler, Carl McAllister. The number is too long to list them all. …
