Incessant Expressions

I finally got some quick lites and decided to give the Tangiers another shot. This time I used some cheap Chinese finger coals that Berge gave me to try, they didn’t look like much but burned very hot (no idea what brand they were, the logo was in an “Arabic” dialect that neither Berge nor his wife could read although both can speak Arabic). He was told they last for a long time which if you consider 50 minutes a long time then they live up to the claim. The coal was a regular square shaped silver-coated finger coal, scored into thirds (most are scored into quarters) and broke easily.

I packed up my Tangiers Small Funnel but I over zealously packed it and ended up wasting a little shisha after the coals were done. This time I got billowing smoke plumes for at least 35-40 minutes, even when the coals were nearly the size of a dime. That’s the greatest asset of this bowl: it gets extremely hot (hotter than my glazed and unglazed ceramic ones) so the shisha stays very warm the entire time you’re smoking. But like last time, the smoke was harsh but had a thicker tea flavour. Soon I’ll try using some halved Three Kings 33mm discs to see if I can get the heat just right. This was a more “productive” outing than the last time I smoked the Tangiers but I still got harsh smoke.

I did manage to figure out that all those times I was busy poking a hole in the middle of my foil for air to flow down the funnel was a waste of time. I believe the mixture of the heated air through the central air hole I made and the outer air rings I’d put in the foil were just counter-acting each other by mixing flavourful shisha smoke with hot air straight off the coals (and it got more charcoal in my stem than I wanted!). I’ll be nixing that extra hole from now on and figuring out a different foil pattern for Three Kings.

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