E. Andrew Briars

E. Andrew Briars is an American pipe workshop run at a one-man bench in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The maker behind the brand appears in official records as Edward Jurkiewicz; in pipe circles he was known as "Andrew," and the brand name grew out of these two names.

Sources do not agree on the spelling of the surname: the funeral home's and the local newspaper's notices give "Jurkiewicz," while pipe literature uses "Jurkieweicz." According to his obituary he was born on 29 May 1936 and died in Milwaukee on 23 December 2017 at the age of eighty-one.

From Machinist to Pipe Maker

Jurkiewicz's actual profession was not pipe making. He worked for thirty-seven years as a machinist at the Allen-Bradley plant, a maker of automation equipment. According to the obituary, his interests were not confined to the bench; he studied English literature at Marquette University, made oil-pastel paintings, and made time for history reading and learning Japanese. He kept up pipe making alongside these pursuits, as an after-hours occupation.

He learned the craft around Milwaukee's long-established tobacconist Uhle's. Jack Uhle, who guided him, had himself learned the trade directly from Achille Savinelli, founder of the Savinelli brand. In this way, the family tree of a Milwaukee bench connects, two generations removed, to the main line of Italian pipe making. No source gives the exact year he began making pipes under his own name; according to accounts this falls around the early 1980s.