Night owls

20 October 2015

According to Tom Kieft, the Amsterdam Pipe Museum is probably the museum with the most swag in Amsterdam. Imagine yourself as a classic womanizer like Harry Mulisch or Prince Bernhard and make your way through the night.

The Museum Night for pipe lovers
The former Amsterdam Pipes Room (and later the Pipes Cabinet) was renamed the Amsterdam Pipe Museum in 2013 for the purpose of international promotion and at the expense of a number of easily accessible jokes. This small canal house museum on the Prinsengracht is an ideal stopover on Museum Night. On 7 November the Amsterdam Pipe Museum is more than just the wet dream of every pipe lover; you can enjoy delicious local sausages here and quench your thirst with bottled German beer . This beer is not your average Oettinger pilsner, but a smoked beer. And no, smoked beer is not a bottle filled with cigarette butts, but a beer made from smoked hops. I can tell you: fucking nice and especially for our "more-hop-is-hip IPA lovers", it is a must to come and taste this hip hop beer.

Traditional likes
Even if smoked beer, sausages or the beautiful building are not convincing, the collection and the accompanying explanations give sufficient reason to visit this site on November 7. Throughout the evening, museum staff are ready to tell you all about the pipe collection of the Amsterdam Pipe Museum. This collection ranges from 500 BC to the present, from the first South American tobacco pipes to nineteenth-century European pipes, from Turkish shishas to Chinese opium pipes. You will learn that pipes are more than just pleasure instruments. There are French pipes in the museum with pictures of favourite writers, a kind of traditional "like" to inform friends and strangers about your literary preferences. With other pipes in the museum, the shape of the pipe has an even more important public function. For example, the gigantic chief pipes from Cameroon are, in addition to smoking equipment, objects to express power: the owner of the largest pipe has the most power. So even with pipes: size does matter!

Characteristic pipes
The museum curator will talk twice in the evening about well-known twentieth-century pipe smokers such as writer Harry Mulisch and Prince Bernhard, their favourite pipes and how the specific pipes of these gentlemen match their character. If you are inspired by all this beauty and you want to acquire a pipe for yourself, you are at the right place, because in addition to a pipe museum, this building also houses a well-equipped pipe shop. On the ground floor of the Amsterdam Pipe Museum you can buy a pipe, with which you can parade with swagger to the next museum.

News archive