Sandblasted Paneled Poker with Thermometer Tobacco Pipe

Werner Mummert is no stranger to strange pipes. They are his forte. Even so, we weren't expecting this one. The style is familiar enough, and indeed could be argued as restrained for Werner; it's one of his Cubist Pokers, yes, yet one where he did not go full De Stijl in a display of bold colors. Its use of ring grain and a contrast stain to highlight is downright conventional.

What caught us off guard was the thermometer. Naturally many a pipe smoker has obsessed over working out their cadence to find that perfect-smoke sweet spot, wherein the tobacco is kept lit, tongue bite is avoided, and flavor is at its best. While other factors play into this, such as the leaf's moisture, cadence is a big one, as the pace at which you puff affects burn rate, and burn rate affects temperature — and temperature in the chamber in turn affects the temperature of the smoke stream that hits your palate, as well as to some degree (no pun intended) what is in the smoke stream's composition.

The obvious solution is practice, practice, practice. The obvious complement to that solution is objective feedback — as provided by a thermometer. It's obvious, and yet, which pipemaker is bold enough to simply put a thermometer on one of their hand-crafted pipes? Werner Mummert.