Clay Pipe

The clay pipe is a pipe type, molded from white-firing pipe clay, in which bowl and stem form a single piece. From the late 16th century, when tobacco reached Europe, until the late 19th century, when cheap cigarettes spread, it remained the continent's near-universal pipe. Smoked everywhere from the tavern to the hearth, this cheap "people's pipe" went unrivaled among pipe bowl materials for roughly three centuries.

Making It and Its Smoking Character

In traditional production, white-firing pipe clay sourced from England or from around Cologne, Liège, and Rouen was hand-rolled into a fillet, the smoke channel opened with a thin wire, the body pressed in a greased metal mold, and the bowl shaped with a conical punch. Trimmed and stamped pipes were then fired at temperatures up to 1050°C. The heel stamps makers applied, along with the relief bowl decoration common between 1725 and 1825, served as the product's signature.

Clay's greatest virtue as a smoke is its neutrality: the material adds no flavor of its own to the tobacco and holds no ghost aroma, which is why tobacco blenders still use clay pipes for test smokes today. The bowl is also effectively burnout-proof; a dirtied pipe could simply be refired in an oven to clean it, and taverns even kept pipes hygienic by baking shared ones on iron grates. On the other hand the body heats up considerably (which is why a clay pipe is held by the stem rather than the bowl), the smoke runs hot and dry, and the pipe itself is extremely fragile. That's why millions of broken clay-pipe fragments turn up in the landfill and riverbed strata of European cities.