[dls]

I typically smoke out of a briar, simply because thats what I have, but I enjoy aromatics in my cob occasionally. The other night however, I tried smoking out a meerschaum for the first time (it belonged to a friend of mine). Compared to my briar, I would say the flavor was the same, but the meerschaum smoked a little cooler. I'm now looking into buying my own meerschaum. My question is this, if meerschaum imparts no flavor of its own, and smokes cooler than briar (this may just be my fault), why does briar seem to be the overwhelming choice of serious pipe smokers? To be fair, I've only smoked "mid range" briars so far (savinelli etc), so I would expect the higher quality briars to smoke considerably better.