How to Pack a Bowl Correctly

We can discuss volume, airflow, and flame-angle, but at the end of the day, there are two right ways to prepare a bowl. Throughout this article, we’ll talk about these two methods and provide benefits and disadvantages to both. But first, what happens when a bowl’s packed incorrectly?

Did You Pack Your Bowl Correctly?

Many of us have had the unfortunate experience of casually tossing an entire nug into a bowl and trying to light it up. It doesn’t tend to go well. Even if seemingly packed correctly, the experience is something akin to smoking a rock covered in moss. The outside – while green and vibrant – is burned away to expose a useless core. Let’s not forget to mention the butane flavor from the flames cresting around the sides of the nug; that’s gross. Using hemp wick helps avoid the unwelcome BIC flavor, as well as reducing the lungs’ intake of butane. Long story short, don’t thrown a full nug into your bowl and expect much to happen.

What You Need to Pack a Bowl

To pack the perfect bong bowl you’ll need all the right tools. These are probably the things you usually use but we’ll run down a short list to make sure.

1. Cannabis. The weed you have should be properly dried and ready to be ground without being too sticky.

2. Grinder. Choose a weed grinder that has medium-sized holes that wont provide too fine of a grind.

3. Pipe or Bong with a bowl. A fourteen millimeter bowl is the typical size but larger bowls exist with bigger capacity.

4. Hemp wick or lighter. A standard lighter will work but if you want to cut down out the butane flavor from your smoke sesh then using a hemp wick will taste fresh.

5. The Bowl Packer Pipe Tamper to Tamp your pipe or bong while smoking

Here’s How to Load a Bowl

Hand-packing is the oldest method, involving breaking up some bud with two fingers against the palm (or preferably on a clean surface), and was the standard practice before grinders. The argument to hand packing is the bud breaks up enough to neatly pack into a bowl while preventing the compromise of the nug’s potency. A grinder is not exactly a gentle tool – that’s why they have kief screens, so it can reclaim all that kief – those trichomes being knocked off in the grinding process. Breaking nugs up by hand in as few motions as possible preserves all those trichomes in order taste and feel the full power of the flowers.

Step 1: Grind Your Weed

While hand packing is a useful technique, using a grinder provides other benefits. When grinding flowers, the surface area increases, meaning more of that flower can fit into a bowl or a vape chamber. Having maximum surface area is the key to getting a big hit because the heat source can come into contact with as much of the bud as possible. That’s why it’s wise to use a grinder when loading bowls for a vaporizer or to share hits in a larger pipe.

Here is how to load a bong bowl and get a great smoke every time. Load the grinder with a big nug by breaking the nug into two or three smaller pieces and pushing it into the grinder teeth. Close the grinder and give it several turns in both directions until it provides little to now resistance. The finer grind, the lighter the bowl pack. Pushing down too much on finely ground weed will lead to a clogged bowl that may need to be dumped out and reloaded.

Step 2: Load the Bowl

Packing takes practice, manual dexterity – and some may say it’s for purists –but the quality of flavor is supreme. After breaking the bud up by hand, it’s time to do the packing. Throw one of the more significant bits in the bottom to act as a screen, layer the rest on top, and then gently push down on the entire bowl. Using a light touch is critical to success when packing a bowl like this.

Something that will make a difference in all of this is what type of bowl you are using and if the bowl has a screen or a built-in filter. These types of bowl setups will have better airflow and can burn through a tightly packed bowl with ease. Keep this in mind when using a filtered bowl and feel free to pack it more densely regardless of your grinding method.

Smoke Your Bowl

Light one side or one corner of the bowl with your lighter or hemp wick. Don’t hold the flame to the bowl for more than a second or two and let the embers of the bowl do the job of making the rest of the bowl smoke. Dont forget to tamp your Pipe with the Bowl Packer Packer Tamper when the pipe becomes hard to draw from. Inhale and have a good time.

So when it’s time to sit down with a fat nug, find your favorite pipe and try each method out to notice the differences. When loading a bowl, remember: either break it up by hand and pack it tight or grind it fine and press lightly. With this little bit of advice, never risk wasting a bowl again.

Tamping is the act of pressing down the ember closer toward unlit tobacco to continue the downward burning process, especially following the initial light: Introducing heat causes the tobacco to twirl and twist and dance upward, and tamping is essential for bringing it back to rim level. Neglect can cause the ember to die, and correct tamping can also assist in relighting. It’s no mystery that as tobacco burns from the top down, it leaves residual ash on top, and that ash becomes thicker the further down the tobacco burns. When relighting, then, the flame must overcome that distance to reach unlit tobacco. If too thick, the ash can make relighting difficult. Tamping effectively decreases this distance, as if moving the bottom of the box of tobacco closer to my grasp. It’s a simple, convenient, and logically sensible procedure but one whose absence would make smoking through an entire chamber nigh impossible.

Pressing down the ember may be tamping’s main objective, but the process has other benefits as well. When packing a bowl, I often err on the side of packing it more loosely than tightly. If I realize while smoking that the tobacco is too loosely packed, then I can apply some added pressure through tamping and correct the original packing. Were the tobacco packed too tightly, however, I would be resigned to suffer a tight draw and poor smoking performance or would have to surrender my losses completely, empty the chamber, and re-pack the bowl. Tamping, after all, is a one-way street, but it can effectively assist in packing if one plans appropriately beforehand.

A short video of the Bowl Packer Pipe Tamper in use.

First choose a pipe or bowl

Your first step in packing a bowl is to choose the right pipe. First, choose the type of pipe you’ll be smoking out of. The second thing to consider when choosing the right pipe is how much smoking material can the pipe fit. Third thing to consider is the style or look of the pipe.

Second choose what your going to smoke

It could be tobacco or hemp, but the second thing you need to decide is what to smoke.

Third grind smoking materials

Put the smoking materials in top of grinder (the part with the teeth). Next turn the top of the Grinder grinding the smoking materials

Open Grinder and Pack Bowl

Open the grinder compartment with the smoking material. Next dump the smoke material on a tray for rolling cigarettes or packing pipes. Finally take the smoking materials with your fingers and pack the materials in the bowl end of the pipe.

Tamp the pipe to keep it going

Tamp the pipe with The Bowl Packer Pipe Tamper part of the way through to keep the ember going.

The Bowl Packer Pipe Tamper is a blunt instrument, shaped like the top of a nail, with a flat end for tamping down the tobacco when the bowl is being packed, and for crushing the ash together to aid relighting.

The Bowl Packer Pipe Tamper Lighter Attachment Tool

The Bowl Packer Pipe Tamper is the best option for you to pack your pipe before smoking and during your smoke.

You can buy your pipe tamper at Thebowlpacker.com or at etsy.com/shop/TheBowlPacker