Red Hat Pipes

Red Hat Pipes is the brand Danish pipe maker Kjeld Sørensen uses in place of his own name. Sørensen, after spending twenty-five years in the corporate world as an economist, left that profession and began making pipes full-time from 2003 onward. His workshop is in Himmelev, near Roskilde, and production has never scaled beyond a one-man bench.

The brand is counted among the later-generation representatives of the independent-maker tradition that has persisted in Denmark since the 1960s: there is neither mold production nor assistant labor at the workshop, and every pipe leaves the same hand from start to finish. That Sørensen came to the trade in mid-life and from a completely different field is a rare, though not unique, path in Danish pipe making.

Origin of the Name

The brand's name is taken from a tradition of the South Zealand pipe club Sørensen has long belonged to. The club takes part in slow-smoking competitions wearing red hats; this detail, which helps distinguish its members from one another in crowded halls, in time became the workshop's name as well. According to accounts, the pipes were first shown widely under this name at the annual pipe gathering in Chicago in 2005; the date has not been possible to confirm in an independent record.