Post written on 01 April 2010
Some two days ago I stumbled on YouTube on a pipe smoker from Latvia, Zubris. The pipe smoker has some tips&tricks that looked very interesting, so I said, let’s try some of them.
The first advice that I tried on my own skin is this: instead of 9 mm carbon filter you can use rice. Zubris says that the rice has an unique property: he can absorb water twice the amount of the carbon, which stops working after the humidity is passing over 80%.
For my experiment, i used rice taken from a local hypermarket.
Personally, i do not use filters from some time, but as i have sometime hyper-salivation i searched for a replacement that would not interfere with the smoke and does not let any saliva gather in the shank and that terrible “for-for-for” noise starts to hear. Also, if i hyper-salivate and i take a stronger smoke, a dark brown liquid is running in my mouth which is given me a very bad taste in my mouth (saliva +nicotine+tar and other stuff with bad parfume).
Here is how i smoke a pipe with rice: i inserted some rice beans (10-15 beans) on the bottom of the bowl before i inserted the tobacco. The rice can be inserted also in the shank, in the place of the filter, but you could have the surprise that one bean is going into the stem and kills any chance of smoking.
Then i inserted the tobacco and let us smoke. The smoke was very nice, dry and cold, the pipe (a half-bent Adsorba) worked perfectly.
To be sure of my results, i tried this system again, i used a more difficult pipe, a full-bent:
I inserted the rice, the tobacco and i started smoking. Ah, i forgot to tell you that in both cases i used a strange tobacco, which i do not fully understand, Poeschl Exclusiv Royal, an interesting tobacco, with a mix of Virginia, Burley and a little bit of Oriental.
The result: the humidity of the smoke remained constant during the smoke, just on the last smokes i felt the bitter taste which i got before. After the pipe was finished, i took some photos of the ashes:
Please judge yourselves, by the color of the rice that turned brown from white, if this replacement for the 9 mm carbon filter is working or not…
