Category: tips

Careful with that Axe, Eugene”

Well
Just in the last few hours I’ve come close to doing some major damage. I’m human sometimes too.
I’m a big fan of milk in my water bottle. I just cleaned it out well pouring the 3 days milk and adding cold.
You should have seen the long tube of blue’ cheese French style that came out.
That is why I use a brush in the tube, and I’ve been cleaning bottle and tube with watered down soap liquid for dishes for years. Do your dishes taste like soap? Probably not if you use rinsing hot water which can be a b— if you rinse the bottle and don’t verrrrrrry gradually make the water rinsisng it colder.Take your time or the bottle WILL break.
Also, never pick your hookah up by the top stem, or the bottle might fall and break. Eugene, as once happened to yours truly.

Another safe hint. Make sure that when you attatch the hose again, there is no ceramic head on the top as gravity or swaying wil make it fall off!

I will make this point separately, but right now I am smoking “Nakhla” cherry and mint mixed at exactly a 50-50 ratio and it wil beat your same mix anyday. How? By mixing in the same bowl, you never get it to blend well . You do get a mix, but if you use a double-clay head, and put one flavour in each side and a coal on each, you are bringing the two flavours from their bowls into a common funnel and actually tasting the 2 flavours as meant to be!
See photo:
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hookah1

There are many good ideas for preparing the tobacco bowl.
These would fall under the catagagories of:
how much tobacco to put in the bowl
How to pack the shisha in bowl
foil or no foil
how to prepare the foil
rubber grommet under the bowl-make it fit
adding charcoal to the bowl
don’t forget to smoke!

Hookah Accsessories.How much is enough?

An important part of setting up your hookah are getting the right parts and accessories.

( waterpipe or is also called shisha in Arabic Nargile, Nargilah in Lebanon and Syria, Hubbly Bubbly in India.)
With people getting on an airplane and flying to other continents the cultures mixed and the names were interchanged.(Don’t forget Marco Polo who opened up trade routes from Italy to China, India and Arabia hundreds of years ago )
Some online companies will sell you package deals with all the basic parts and extra accsessories. I’ve checked out the prices per company-yes buying the package deal will save you a few dollars, but it insures you as a first time hookah buyer that you’ll have ” tires on your new car” when you attempt to drive it out of the store at purchase time!
Of course buying your first hookah you can expect all its parts which from bottom to top are :
Glass Bowl (Holds the water)

Big rubber grommet (to attach and seal to the metal pipe and rod)
Lets make a P.S. here, many new modern hookahsare now screw-in types.

Metal shaft (half is in the bowl of water partially submerged in h2o)
and the middle of the shaft hugging the big rubber grommet with the top of the shaft (designed and colored as you ordered) on the top…

Holding first the metal flat dish :
which gives outwards flare , pleasure to the eye and most importantly will hopefully catch any falling charcoals, and ashes.

Next step up is the
clay, pyrex, glass or ceramic shisha tobacco -holding bowl.
Originally the only bowl offered online was the basic brown clay glazed bowl holding 15-20 grams of shisha tobacco and tended to make you try to pack in 2 more grams ” for the road”-thereby guaranteeing you an over hot and too cooked smoke !
I had about 12 of them, not in case they broke, but if I wanted a long smoke, I’d have to change to a second bowl. I tossed em all in the garbage happily when “Smoking-Hookah.com” was the first to sell these little cuties on their web site :
Large-Clay-BowlAs you see, these come in various color and you canput 2 or 3 times the size of a regular bowl.
Soon they offered the double-bowl
This an ingenious idea first from “Smoking-Hookah. com” based on their knowledge of actual smokingscience.
The double bowl is not for lazy smokers who can’t mix their banana flavor with a cool mint for example. We learned how to do THAT at age 4!
No, the idea is simple but no one thought it out- if you mix say, Al-Waha com. cherry flavor with nakhla com. “Coca cola” to make a classic “Cherry-Coke” inthe same bowl you’ll be sorry.
Al-Waha has a certain percentage of glycerine which they mix into the fruit and honey to help blend it even and insure a wet smoke that never is suposed to burn the shisha, but the glycerine assures the DISAPATION or vaporizing of the shisha mixture.
“Nakhla” com adds their certain percentage of glycerine.
So being the two of them in one bowl will never burn uniformly.
I found this out years ago from actually doing it. I only found out a year later the scientific reason.
An added intesting note:
In Germany to order shisha online it has to be under 5% glycerine.Each country has their own funny laws, but most of the shisha we are merited to buy is made in the Arab countries at 25% glycerine,sometimes more along with tobacco ,fruit and honey.(see this link)

http://www.head-nature.com/04477.html
I’ve seen now triple head bowls but my logic says that 3 flavors mixed wil be like having a “Bloody-Mary” with added in banana juice! Vodka and tomatoe juice are a nice mix, add spices if you’d like, but sweet banana will kill it.
Then again, I’ll discuss mixing shisha in another area.
There are also some nice one headed bowl with 2,3 or 4 sections. The same principle and a fine idea.
Here we are almost at the top of the hookah and I’ve let you hanging….
After packing your shisha, how to tips or not to do things will also be in another space on this blog.
Here we come to the Skullcap of the shisha bowl. A thin piece of aluminium foil, punched in theoretically certain patterns to give you the smoothest, coolest burn in the bowl and the thickest smoke.

(at this point, let me state a fact, not opinion that is quite basic).
There are many experts like wine snobs who smell the wine blindfolded and on tv or the movies will crow out “ah- yes a good Bordeaux, must be a vintage 1978 from…yes Alsace near the fork in the old road….” I will never claim inthis blog to be an expert, but I’ve been followingthe best of hookah forums from the US of A, Middle-East, UK Great Britain , one German forum which is also “big” enough to publish in English too. French I don’t understand, “well, shut my mouth”. This section on forum info and great hookah shisha references, postings and such is so vast, but its all here at my fingertips and waiting only to type up under”Hookah forums” if you’ve got about 5 hours a day for 4 years running, you’ll vacumn up what I’ve read and digested too.
This is to say, some experts say punch “21-25 holes” in the foil
(oh no, I’ve punched 26, now what?), or to punch in a star pattern, Is that Surius, Star of David, Bethleham or the Crescent of Islam? We don’t want a religous war starting in the hookah lounge nor with your hoomies either!
Ever heard the saying : “Different strokes for different folks”? Well that’s the approach I prefer. Do whatever is working good for you add your own personal input as long as its working.
There is a great scientific idea which is smart chemistry knowledge (I flunked basic chemistry) in the wonderful ,well set up RollsRoyce of all hookah forums hookahforum.com
If you look in its vast archive under “tobacco (or) shisha conditioning” or “acclimitizing” you’ll see that “Tangiers” of “Tangiers” shisha tobacco fame explains all of his secrets to the whole world including how he is making (had made) his new brand and flavors.
I’ve yet to taste any of his brand.
Maybe “Tangiers” will give out free samples to some of this blog’s subscribers and those who have added comments. (hint,hint, nudge,nudge, wink,wink)
The foil.http://www.smoking-hookah.com/Products/Accessories/Hookah-Foil-(100-pcs).asp
I bought my first very cheap pack of 100 foils 3 years ago.
“Wow, they sure packed one-hundred foils thinly ” as I saw at first glance.
Suprise when I opened the thin box and found an added touch. In order for the foils not to stick together they packed between each aluminum sheet a waxed paper cut the same size with orange letter writing….I’m not making this up the orange print was-you guessed right if you are married or have a girlfriend or are female. “TAMPAX”.
That was no advertisement, sometimes there were 2 or 3 waxed Tampax sheets in between each foil.
As the son of and grandson of the first re-cyclers way back in the 1940’s until the 70’s (yeah, scrap-metal dealers). It takes a genius to make money out of junk.
As the son of a man who graduated from junk dealing to selling the wax that went on a mid-western paper mill and upwards from there, some wax paper dealer had each company’s extra pages to get rid of, and business from the U.S. met Jordan in the Middle-East! (not my father’s portfolio this time around) but its a true story.
Maybe you’ll be lucky and get “Fannie Farmer Candies com.waxed wrappers with the chocolate flavor smell still in.
Life is so sweet and often funny.
http://www.smoking-hookah.com/Products/Accessories/Hookah-Foil-(100-pcs).asp in case you didn’t look the first time around at the link.
These nifty foils are great and easy to use.
I remember reading on “Abulehleh co. il” forum site somewhere in the middle-east 4 or more years back. This smart one had a great idea to take a rubber eraser and painfully force pins into it all the way of the number and design you’d like to use on your foil Wwll, same hole pattern each time. Now don’t prick yourself sticking 20-35 holes in a rubber eraser.
I knew it was a nice idea and never tried it.
Came again. the experienced purveyors of great hookahs, tobacco and designers of progressive accsessories….again
look here at this screaming-yellow zombie light plastic pre-hole puncher. Scientific march of hookah progress!
I’ve much more to add on accessories and since thse are the basics, I’ve dealt withthem at length.

See you al soon for more accssesory ideas.
Maybe I’ll read a few comments hint hint by the time I log in again.
Arrivaderci, Salaam,Shalom,bye,syonara shisha-san.(hookah1)

Aluminum foil or no?

No foil? Better watch out. Many peoples of theMiddle-East smoke hookah with no metal screen or foil. The Iranian type tobacco with a special Iranian head is needed.(They really have special heads in Iran).
Iranian tobacco is usually bought in a bulk pack of dry tobacco leaves which need to be wet, then rinsed and let dry a tiny bit so that it is not dripping into the hookah stem. I learned the hard way, when I first bought a small pack and smoked it srtraight dry, underfoil.
One, I didn’t wet it and two I used foil, which cooked the very strong tobacco and made it harsh.
That’s why we use a screen or foil, so that the hookah shisha underneath will not cook, but evaporate the shisha mixture of honey,fruit and glycerine in a way that it slowly dissapates and gives you a good even taste.
If your hookah bowl is smoking, for sure you’ve put on too much coal. packed the shisha too tight for air under the foil to circulate, packed it down lightly but its touching the aluminum foil at the top, or all of the above.
We were all beginning smokers once, and in the beginning I would do all of them at once!
Its hard to believe that putting less shisha in the bowl actually is a smoother smoke, less harsh and will smoke longer than packing twice as much as you need.
Another hint is to pack lower than the aluminum foil so that the sheesha will in no way come close to touching the foil and getting burnt from the charcoal.
I mean to add on to this section much info.
Remember that for sure there are a lot of good ideas on getting a smooth smoke, slowly you learn, and an expert you don’t have to be since we are always learning.
The pleasure of adding to your knowledge is a big part of smoking the hookah and “improves on the taste.” Make the hookah your hobby, too.

I am going to suggest using heavy, heavy duty aluminum foil, since after you’ve poked your holes, you can keep it for many smokes!
Hookah1