Corn Cob Pipe showing The Club Name
Another view of the Corn Cob Pipe showing the date
A big shout out to all my loyal followers. Here we are post Labor Day and it's a rather cool evening here in New York and I am just sitting down to write my review of the NY Pipe Club's second annual picnic held on Saturday August 14th, 2010. The picnic was once again held at member Todd Platek's house in beautiful Berkeley Heights New Jersey. Todd was nice enough again, he must love doing this, to open his house and yard to the New York Pipe Club members and their families to enjoy a day filled with food, booze and of course plenty of pipe smoking.
The day turned out to be a gorgeous day with overcast skies and low humidity. We were able to sit in the backyard amongst the trees and enjoy the great food and drink. Club member Avi and I meet in Queens and we drove out to Todd's house arriving there about 1:30pm. Since this was a BYOB (bring your own booze) event Avi brought a six pack of beer and yours truly brought, which was well received, a bottle of Knob Creek Single Batch Bourbon.
Lou Carbon, Club President, brought his two sons plus the blends from Russ for us to sample again, and for those who were not at the August meeting so we could try them and decide which blends would become the official New York Pipe Club blends. Also Peter Guss brought the official New York Pipe Club Corn Cob pipes and a bunch of aromatics that we could smoke in the corn cobs so as not to gunk up our more elegant pipes.
Todd was nice enough to provide the food for the event as well as sodas. The food consisted of hot dogs, burgers, hot and sweet Italian sausages, ribs, pork chops and corn on the cob. He also provided chips to accompany the beer and bourbon. The picnic lasted well past sunset and the guys were having such a grand time that we all decided to light up another bowl to end such a glorious evening. I ended the the evening smoking a bowl of Cornell and Deihl's Gentleman Caller which has a Deer Tongue Perique as one of the blends.
As the evening wore on club members Dan and Alan treated us to some impromptu live music with Alan playing his flute and Dan playing his bongo drums. They played a number of songs including, one of my favorites, their rendition of Dizzy Gillespie's A Night In Tunisia.
I sampled the Straight Virginia blend but was underwhelmed and decided to take a sample to smoke at a later date. As I am writing this review I have tried the Straight Virginia again and enjoyed it enough that I will vote for it as one of the Official Pipe Club Blends.
I will try to post pictures from the picnic for all my readers to see and for those members who were unable to attend the picnic.
Well I will close this post now only to say that I will be attending the September meeting of the New York Pipe Club which will be held on Tuesday September 14th, 2010 at Florio's in Little Italy. Hopefully we'll get the Club meerschaum which we ordered back at the June 2010 meeting.
I have heard through the cigar and pipe ash that Barclay Rex is planning, for the end of September, a cigar event featuring Rocky Patel cigars. They have contacted Rocky Patel to see if he can fit it into his schedule to appear at this event. No word on whether he's accepted the invitation but one can only hope.
Until next time I bid you happy smoking.
