Whether you are an enthusiastic daily smoker or you simply enjoy smoking on weekends and special occasions, pairing every pipe in your collection with the perfect tobacco blend will help to make each bowl you smoke that much more enjoyable. Before we consider which blends go best with which types of pipes, we’d like to explain why it is a good idea to use one pipe for one specific blend or type of tobacco blend, rather than mixing and matching your tobacco pipes and tobacco blends at random.

Ghosting: Why Many Enthusiasts Maintain a Large Collection of Tobacco Pipes

Even if you don’t pair each pipe in your collection with a particular tobacco blend, it’s still a good idea to use one pipe for each type of blend that you smoke, especially if most or all of your pipes are made from briar. This is because briar pipes are susceptible to ghosting. Ghosting is when the flavor from a previous bowl of tobacco can still be detected while smoking a new blend in the same pipe.

If you smoke heavily cased aromatics, ghosting can be an especially difficult problem to overcome. The simplest way to ensure that ghosting does not spoil your enjoyment of different tobacco blends is to use one pipe for each type of blend that you enjoy. For example: use one pipe for aromatics, one for English blends, and one for straight Virginia tobaccos.

If you enjoy buying lots of new pipes, you could go a step further and allocate one pipe for each specific blend that you smoke; i.e. one pipe for Peterson Night Cap, one pipe for Mac Baren Seven Seas Royal Blend, and so on.

Incidentally, if you’re worried about the cost of building a large collection of pipes, we recommend ordering from companies that sell wholesale tobacco pipes at highly competitive prices, such as ourselves.

Now let’s find out how to pick the perfect tobacco blend for each pipe that you own.

Which Tobacco Blends Go Best with Which Types of Tobacco Pipes?

While there are no hard and fast rules, many pipe smokers find that certain types of tobacco blends taste better when smoked in a particular type of pipe. The suggestions below are based on the opinions of many pipe smokers from all around the world. You can, of course, smoke any type of blend in any type of pipe you fancy but it’s well worth trying out these suggestions if you’re looking for ways to improve your pipe smoking experience.

Bent Pipes – Pipes with bent rather than straight stems are a great choice for Virginia tobaccos. This is because the total length of the stem on a bent pipe is generally longer than it would be on a straight pipe of similar dimensions, allowing the smoke to cool more before it reaches your mouth (when smoking the same tobaccos in pipes with shorter stems, many people experience unpleasant tongue bite). There are many types of pipes that come with bent stems, including billiard pipes, apple pipes, bulldog pipes, and Dublin pipes. There are also certain types of pipes that always have a bent stem, such as calabash pipes. Whichever type of bent pipe looks and feels best to you will be a good choice to pair with your favorite Virginia tobacco.

Corn Cob Pipes – Corn cob tobacco pipes come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and can be used to smoke any type of blend you enjoy. However, because their low price makes them almost disposable, they are a good choice for heavy aromatic blends that could cause serious ghosting issues in more expensive briar pipes. It is also worth keeping a few spare corn cob pipes in your collection at any given time to use for testing news blends that you buy. Many pipe smokers like to pair a nice burley blend with their favorite corn cob pipe but you can try pairing yours with whatever blend you are particularly fond of.

Large Billiard, Bulldog, and Apple Pipes – The larger versions of pipes with these types of bowls are often paired with more complex tobaccos by pipe smoking enthusiasts, such as English/Balkan blends. This is because the bigger bowls provide more room for all of the different flavors to develop, which makes it easier to enjoy them to the full. If you like smoking particularly strong tobaccos such as dark-fired Kentucky blends, a bulldog is a good choice because it will normally have a shallower bowl than a comparable billiard or apple pipe.

Meerschaum Pipes – Meerschaum pipes are named after the material from which they are made rather than a particular bowl shape. Meerschaum is a white, clay-like mineral that is easy to carve, making it a good material for more ornate pipe designs. However, the reason many pipe smokers enjoy these pipes is not because of the intricate carving but rather because they are far less susceptible to ghosting than briar tobacco pipes. Heavily cased aromatics, strong Kentucky blends and complex English blends are therefore all good candidates to pair with your favorite meerschaum.

If you would like to expand your current pipe collection, please feel free to browse our extensive range of wholesale tobacco pipes, all of which can be ordered online right now. And don’t let the term ‘wholesale’ put you off: you can order as few or as many pipes as you like and still take advantage of our wholesale prices!