Japanese artisan Kenichiro Sakurai’s visionary new designs and iconoclastic interpretations of the neo-classics are making quite a stir in the pipe world, but how well can he execute a stone-cold classic? You know, the forms that allow zero wiggle room due to having encountered hundreds of machine created iterations? As you can see on your screen, magnificently. Stretching six and a quarter elegant inches, this Danish-inspired bent billiard is the embodiment of quiet sophistication and boasts a tightly striated, blasted grain of such tactile fineness, that the surface almost feels like a fine brocade. While taking Nick’s video tour of this briar, please note the exemplary slotting, the starting point of Ken-san’s painstaking attention to interior detail and engineering. To a pipe, Sakurai’s briars are cool smoking and open of draw (just a tad more restricted than the work of Brian Ruthenberg). Kenichiro Sakurai’s star is on the rise, and a price point of just $375 makes it quite easy to hitch a ride.

Bear Graves