Some light entertainment

When you walk through the door of the Briary on the night of the monthly Magic City Pipe Club meeting, the smoke is musky and thick enough to see sunbeams streaming through it. For the couple of dozen people smoking tobacco pipes, this is just the way they like it.

David Beaumain, who was part of the core four or five smokers who have been in the Magic City Pipe Club since the very beginning, said that the club is more about enjoying the good company than it is about the pipes.

“It’s not just pipes, it’s not just cigars, it’s not just tobaccos, we cover everything from jokes to world philosophy to everything else,” Beaumain said. “It’s a bunch of guys getting together and relaxing and being themselves.”

Plus there’s the addition of Pat the Cat, he said, who has been dubbed their unofficial feline mascot after eating some chicken wings at a meeting one day and never left.

As of April 2018, Beaumain said that the Magic City Pipe Club has been going on for approximately four years, with membership rising consecutively each year. The club is open to men and women of smoking age.

“Every time we would see anybody with a pipe or if anybody would come up to us because they saw us with a pipe, we would tell them all about the club,” Beaumain said. “Before we knew it, we got a nice little following.”

They’re now up to around 20 members who meet on the second Monday of every month at the Briary in West Homewood, which Beaumain describes at the best pipe shop within three states. Members arrive between 5 and 6 p.m., and smoking and conversing continue until 8 p.m.

At first, Beaumain said the group met at various restaurant patios each month but eventually wanted to settle on a reoccurring place. Even though the Briary is only open until 6 p.m., they now have an arrangement set up so the club can stay, along with some of the employees, a little later for the monthly meeting. The Briary has exactly the atmosphere the Magic City Pipe Club was looking for, Beaumain said, with welcoming employees and a well-stocked wall of tobacco.

“[The Briary] is an excellent sit-down, enjoy-yourself, camaraderie kind of place, with leather chairs and not too much distractions,” Beaumain said, adding that they honestly consider the employees part of the club at this point.

“We are all already smoking our pipes by the time we walk through the door,” he laughed, and members are usually giddy to try new flavors.

At the meeting, Beaumain said they share each other’s tobaccos and usually begin by getting them all out of the various bags and laying everything in one big mass on the table. Then they pass around pipes, try new flavors and some people even trade pipes. 

If there’s ever a dull moment, members get out their box of England-imported snuff, which is a smokeless tobacco that is sniffed. 

“Before you know it, it’s like comedy hour, especially for the newcomers,” Beaumain said.

Beaumain said they love educating newcomers or “young folks” about pipes, as it is a hobby that over the years has dwindled in popularity. 

“You don’t have to be a snob to do this sort of thing. If you’ve got a corn cob pipe and that’s what you like to smoke, more power to you,” he said.

The kinds of pipes everyone smokes at the meetings varies, Beaumain said, with everything from a commonly popular Briar pipe to an octopus-shaped pipe to a long-stemmed churchwarden. They also smoke both aromatic and non-aromatic tobaccos.  

Beaumain said the club recently partnered with the downtown Ghost Walking Tour for a night of smoking and history education. 

Go to their Facebook page at @magiccitypipeclub to learn more.