Morgan Pipes: Difference between revisions

Morgan Pipes are made by Chris Morgan, who was born and lives in Los Gatos, California. Coming from a long line of pipe smokers, Morgan began his pipe making journey in 2006, starting, as many budding carvers do, with a pre-bored hobby kit. The finished product was Morgan’s first sale. Over the next two decades, Morgan would achieve the kind of success that most pipemakers can only dream of, becoming the equivalent of a household name in the modern pipe smoking scene. Morgan’s accomplishments are noteworthy not only because his pipes have been able to amass a large and dedicated following, but also because of what these accomplishments can teach us about the changing cultural and economic landscape of pipe smoking and pipe making in the 21^st century.  

Morgan continued to make high-grade pipes throughout the 2000s, 2010s, and still makes them today, in the 2020s, in the form of his Hand Made line. At the beginning of the 2010s, however, Morgan’s experiments led him to begin branching out in the range of pipes under the Morgan name. This first took the form of a side-project Morgan began working on in 2011, an attempt to produce a cigar-shaped smoking pipe. Morgan’s idea was to create something that would give its users the same experience as smoking a more traditional pipe, but with the portability associated with a cigar. For the next two years, Morgan developed several iterations of his cigar-pipe idea, sending prototypes of each one out to be tested by regular pipe smokers. In the final revision of the design, Morgan incorporated a plenum space into the pipe’s tenon, an idea suggested by Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Romeo, and inspired by the double-chambered ‘reverse calabash’ pipes of Misha Revyagin. This design became The Briar Cigar, which Morgan began to produce commercially in 2013, and whose design Morgan secured a patent for in 2017.  

The first batches of The Briar Cigar were produced by Morgan in his workshop. In order to meet demand, Morgan then contracted Tommaso Ascorti in Italy to produce the next batches. Ascorti soon took over the Caminetto workshop, however, meaning he no longer had the time to produce The Briar Cigar for Morgan. Morgan then moved production to another pipe factory in Northern Italy, in what had used to be the Rossi campus, where The Briar Cigar has been made ever since. Morgan notes that one significant demographic of buyers for The Briar Cigar has been military personnel, who find it particularly suitable for use during deployments.

To date (2023), Morgan’s most recent line of pipes has been the Workshop Series, the result of a collaboration with friend and fellow pipemaker Sean Reum that began in 2022. Like Morgan’s Hand Made pipes, the Workshop Series are pipes made by hand by Morgan and Reum in their respective California and Montana workshops, with labor split between the two. Advertised as a pipe for smokers wanting to move a step up from factory pipes, pipes in the Workshop Series have been offered as more affordable versions of the artisan high-grade, typically featuring sandblasted finishes and Lucite stems.

Morgan has collaborated in the blending of various pipe tobacco blends over the years. The earliest was produced by Russ Oulette and was named Morgan Cake. More recently, Morgan has worked with Sutliff Tobacco Company on three blends: Bayou Buck, Jackalope, and White Rabbit.

In 2019, Morgan was recruited as a consult and a propmaker for the television series, ''The Underground Railroad'', set in the United States during the early- to mid-1800s. Morgan’s role was ensuring historical accuracy for pipe smoking scenes in the series, as well as producing the kinds of pipes that would have been smoked by various groups during this period. This included crafting ‘slave’ pipes, fashioned from rudimentary materials, as well as traditional tobacco pipes. During production, Morgan collaborated with Chris Kelly, of Eldritch Pipes, to create ‘Ambite,’ a synthetic amber substitute, for historically-accurate meerschaum pipe stems. The series was released in 2020.

Morgan and Sean Reum currently produce a podcast together, called ''Beyond the Pipe''.  

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