Hollywood Briar (David Hopper)

Hollywood Briar is the name American pipe maker David Hopper gave to his bench. Settled in a small college town in southeastern Missouri, the workshop never reached a commercial manufacturing scale; Hopper carried on pipe making alongside his main occupation. The year the brand was born does not appear in the records; the only detailed record available dates to the mid-2010s and gives no founding date.

Setting Up the Bench

Hopper's way into the craft matches that of many self-taught American makers: starting with a kit. Such kits include a briar block with the bowl and shank holes pre-drilled and a factory-made mouthpiece, so a first pipe can be finished without a lathe or drill press. As the story is told, he made his first attempt with just such a kit, before he had a workshop of his own set up; he carried out all the cutting, shaping, and sanding with hand tools, and fitted the ready-made mouthpiece to the body by hand as well.

His equipment grew piece by piece after that. A rotary hand tool (of the Dremel type), a separate buffing unit, and a few basic machines first sped up surface work, then made for a more repeatable finish. Hopper shared his work during this period on online pipe-maker forums and took criticism directly from the community; the knowledge that the pre-internet generation passed from master to apprentice largely circulated through such forums in the post-2000s American scene.