Please Explain Your Love of Peterson Pipes

Oh, so you can quote Ron making a suggestion to me, and insult me in the process (and the others giving their opinion and voicing their disappointment), but when I call you on it, that's all you have to say?
Screw you too, you bloody, arrogant arsehole. 

None of mine look like that. Did you buy them sight unseen? Why did you choose to buy another Peterson after the first couple of bad ones?

It's fine. I like my Dunhill, but I don't think that it smokes 10 times as good as my Savinellis. I'm sure they are great pipes. But you must realize that not everyone has the same bad experience with Peterson as you. After 164 years they are still selling more pipes than any other maker I believe.

Even he probably doesn't.  I was about to respond to a friend on another forum who stated unequivocally that EVERY Peterson he had ever smoked was crap.  I know he's smoked a lot of Petersons, so I know his statement is garbage.  I wrote up a reply, then thought, "Why?"  He's just venting for whatever reason, and intends no malice.

I have over 150 old Petersons (pre-2000) and obviously, 'collect' them.  But I also smoke them.  I've been as critical of newer Petes as anyone, and quite frankly, had been going into each new acquisition with negative expectations.  But now I look over at my 12-pipe rack of pipes I am currently smoking, and suprisingly (to me) four are 2021-22 acquisitions, and are some of my current favorites:  smooth brown 2022 POTY, blasted 2021 Rathbone, terracotta 2021 POTY and a rusticated 2021 POTY.

If someone thinks all Petersons are poor and always will be, then they need to have their head examined if they buy another one.  And I need to have my head examined if I read more than two of their posts on the topic, which is why I've gone to using 'ignore'.

Claude left? That is a pity.

My three best smokers are two Pete House and a Pub— repeating myself I reckon. Sweet, cool, and pleasant. I guess I’ve been lucky.

The 'Pete Geek' pipe is a D18, so I guess I'll be forced to smoke a big one soon.  The only other Pete House pipe I've smoked is an O2 1904 Patent.  It's a great smoker, but I can almost fit an entire plug in it.

Those are fine pipes - makes me wonder why he started this thread.

The fact is - Peterson makes TONS of pipes so there are bound to be some duds.  The recent Rua Spigot release is a perfect example.  I was lucky enough to be there right when they dropped at SmokingPipes.EU, so I had my pick of the littler.  I wanted a Rathbone, but didn't see one, so I grabbed this Professor that has a phenomenal blast.  My understanding is that for this Penzo-project they picked the best ring-grain potential blocks they could find.  I've been watching Pete releases for a while, and these were the finest pipes they've released in years, if not decades.  I was happy to get the Professor, but still showed up for the US release, still looking for a Rathbone.  The US release was not as great, in my opinion.

The downside to the great Rua Spigot release was that there didn't seem to be much great briar left for high-end POTY pipes.  None of the blasted pipes came remotely close to the quality of the Rua Spigots.  Oh well.

That is a nice one but my POY 4ab is pretty bad, so much that I won't smoke it. But my other dozen plus Petes are fine.

I didn't see very many good blasts in the 2021 POTY, nor in the 2022.  I now have a Terracotta, Heritage and rusticated.  I stripped the finish off my rusticated to create a dark brown one, and I really love it, and it's a nice smoker.  The rustication on those pipes is reminiscent of the original Pete rustications from the 1940's, but they did it a disservice with that red and blue staining - makes it look cheap.

Here's the stummel after re-staining and polishing, and a 'before and after'

They now sell a lot of pipes like what you're describing.  They didn't use to - I have never seen an old malformed blasted Peterson.  Bad blasts, but not so much the soft spots.  My guess is that they used to let the briar do the talking (and good briar was plentiful enough to meet production targets), whereas now they have a lot of limited releases where a certain number of pipes have to be made, and they simply run out of good briar.  Can you imagine how ugly a piece of briar has to be to get relegated to rustication?  I think the deeper scoops in the rustication are also indicative of briar issues, even though the result is often very nice.


For the 2022 POTY they planned on 925 pipes.  I suspect the planned percentages for the various grades was much different from what was produced - they could have sold many more of the high-grade pipes if the good briar had been there.  Last year they did a little better in that respect, but the blasts were still generally pretty poor, as you describe, and we saw very few Supremes.

Yeah, it's not technically great, but I love it.  But then again, I really liked the pipe the OP posted that had a similar blast.  The pebbly side was weird, but I even kind of liked that.

I've seen a lot of technically great blasts that I didn't like much.   In fact, I only know they are technically great because I've been told they are by forum members.  I don't make pipes, so my thoughts are based on aesthetics, not technical execution.

Does Peterson still sell Seconds? Can't remember the last time I saw one. Sounds like a lot of what used to be culled and sold as Seconds are going right on out the door as regular Petersons. Or not. Who knows.

Popular myth among the anti-Pete guys.

Go to SmokingPipes.EU and do a search on 'Irish Seconds'.