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Testing Trever (I)

One difference between a perfectionist carver and a merely good one is that the former is always looking for ways to improve his product. Sometimes, he will need guinea pigs to help him do so. That's why I recently received a parcel from Herbignac in Brittany.

So, someone offers you four pipes for free, and that someone happens to be Trever Talbert - so you type an ecstatically understated "count me in", and settle back to twiddle your thumbs for a week. You shout at your angelic children, complain about the truffle salad, and curse at the gorgeous ladies on the television, as you patiently wait for the postman to deliver one gloriously blasted billiard, a second Mountain of Madness, an exquisite miniature Morta and an Ibex to rival Micke's finest moment… or something equally nifty and typical.

Well, if you subject your nerves to such a misguided drama of anticipation, you have yourself to blame for not reading the fine print. As Trever himself warns, testing pipes are a whole different genre. Constituting creations solely aimed at proof (or disproof) of concept, they are experiments stripped of all aesthetic merit - save the fact that they probably aren't purposely made ugly. And then there's the taste…

Testing pipes, being given away, have little immediate impact on bread and beer money. They aren't produced to generate admiration, envy or pride of possession, not even to be 'good smokers' - but merely to help a maker assess an idea or a set of ideas by handing out a few prototypes to pipesters whose opinions he trusts. Some of these ideas may be good, some mediocre and some downright bloody awful. Chances are that not even the good ones will be good in a mature, fully developed way. The bad schemes, on the other hand, might easily be extremely bad. "Nine out of ten ideas turn out to be disappointing to hideous in practice," cautions Trever.

One of Trever's pipes was based on an idea straight from hell - which was to apply a very drastically shortened oil-curing procedure to a standard Ligne Bretagne stummel. Ligne Bretagnes are the pipes Trever makes from old pre-turned bowls he found in the workshop he took over in Brittany a couple of years ago. In my experience, they are excellent value for money, the wood having profited from decades of simple air curing. But Trever wanted to know whether improvements were possible, and subjected these test pipes to various additional curing procedures, all designed to possibly enhance their smoking qualities without breaking his or the customer's budget. Remember, the Ligne Bretagne range is meant to be the affordable segment of the Talbert portfolio.

Well, pipe A (the test pieces are stamped from A to D) tasted like a major disaster at a chemicals factory. I smoked it twice, and I'm pretty sure it won't get any better before the millennium is over. Each puff ripped my mouth and nostrils to shreds, and produced an aroma similar to flambéed rubber served with a rancid butter sauce. With Trever's permission, I don't have to try this one anymore. I was going to take out extra health insurance, had he stuck to his original suggestion that Belgian collector Erwin Van Hove and I smoke each pipe - even culprit A - at least ten times.

Pipe D, on the other hand, delivers no surprises: just a sweet, round, pleasant smoke with the initial test blend Irish Oak (Virginia, Burley and Perique). It is, after all, the placebo pipe - nothing but an untreated Ligne Bretagne bowl. Apart from tasting pretty normal, D gives itself away by not being as dark as the other pipes, which all found their way into Trever's oven (for some reason he hasn't explained yet).

To date, I don't know what Trever did to B and C, but they are not too bad. Straight, simple billiards with comfortable, but curiously half-finished saddle stems, they don't have any grain to speak of. Instead, B has a few shallow fissures on the bowl surface - the result of whatever it went through in that oven. I've smoked each four or five times, now, always in tandem with one of the other pipes to facilitate comparisons. D still tastes better than either of the others, but B is developing a nice, mellow component that goes well with the chosen blend. It also does something special to the Perique, and may even finish the race as the best Va/Perique pipe in the bunch.

Trever suggested trying C with aromatics. Since I don't ever smoke the Danish variety of these, I gave it a spin with Peterson's University Flake. I thought that the fruity strength of that blend should be able to compete with a spicy overtone I had detected in C from the onset, and which was only subsiding very gradually. It was a good idea. The not quite pleasant spice flavour I had experienced with Irish Oak turned into a nice leathery one, spread across the top of the flake's fruity bouquet.

I'll keep you posted. Next time I write about this topic, I shall know more about what Trever has done to the pipes. He'll probably even have a few words of his own to add.

Meanwhile, be warned that becoming a guinea pig is not the best way to start your Talbert collection, so please don't flood Trever with emails suggesting yourself as a candidate. The pipes won't be beauties - though some might be beasts. It would be tantamount to begging for fool's gold.

Having said that, testing is rather fun…

(Martin Farrent)

(Click here for part two of this article)

(March 25, 2004)

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