Christian Wolfsteiner (Tarock Briar)

Christian Wolfsteiner is a pipe maker who signed his pipes with the Tarock Briar stamp and worked in the German city of Ingolstadt. Born in 1961, Wolfsteiner came to the craft late and entirely on his own initiative, and never tried to scale up his output. His name is known not for series production, but for at most a few dozen unusual shapes a year.

The Road to the Workshop

By his own account, Wolfsteiner picked up a single pre-drilled briar block in the winter of 1997-1998 and started experimenting; this one-off impulse turned into a lasting pursuit. In 2001 he set up a small workshop and produced his pipes there. Output was never tied to a regular schedule at any point; the range the maker gave was anywhere from zero to forty pipes a year. This fluctuation is taken as the direct result of pursuing the work as a craft rather than a business.