Well, take a look at what arrived in the mail yesterday:
I was prompted to purchase and try it myself after emailing the kind folks at Hookah-Shisha.com to see if they'd tried it out.
They hadn't.
After fidgeting about for a bit trying to decide what the best course of action was to documenting and reviewing this contraption, I decided that my favorite tobacco mix was probably the best way to go, since it would allow me to compare the smoking experience with one that I'm familiar with, despite not having smoked any shisha in a week or so.
Mmm, delicious, Romman blueberry + mint.
I poked the same hole pattern into the foil that I normally use on a phunnel bowl, since the bowl on the Hookah Flip is about the same size and style.
After setting everything up, I lit up 3 Coco Nara cubes, which is not only what I normally use on a phunnel bowl but also about what most other reviews I'd seen/read online said was appropriate.
Turns out, 3 was way too many. Even on 2 coals, the tobacco seemed to burn, which is apparently not supposed to happen with the Hookah Flip. Not in the usual ashy flavored, harsh burning in the throat kind of way, but more of an intense discomfort in my trachea and bronchi, similar to breathing in a lungful of Hong Kong bus smog, but with a more delightful, slightly minty blueberry flavor. Gee, I wonder why...
Unfortunately, clearing out the Hookah Flip is a lot more work than clearing out a regular bowl. Instead of simply removing the coals and blowing into the hose a few times, I was able to lower and rotate the coals out of the way. Then I blew into the hose a few times.
Then I blew into the hose a few more times.
Then I tried taking another puff, without the coals anywhere near the bowl, and still got that lungful-of-smog feeling.
In all it took about 10 minutes of blowing into the hose, getting tired, and ultimately letting the whole thing sit before all the nastiness had disappeared and I was able to smoke comfortably again.
Once I had the Hookah Flip going comfortably, however, it really smoked like a dream. I didn't feel like I had to pull any harder than on any other bowl in the same setup, and the flavor came through just as I'd remembered it. Even after getting really into the episode of Top Gear I was watching for a while and not smoking for a bit, it started right back up on the first pull.
One thing I really noticed was how much longer the first pair of coals lasted. On a typical bowl setup, I go through a pair of coals in roughly an hour. Even after 67+ minutes of Top Gear, there was no sign of the smoke clouds I was exhaling getting any smaller or thinner. While I didn't time it outright, I'd say the coals lasted about 75 minutes. Not quite the "twice as long" advertised on the back of the packaging, but certainly longer than a pair of Coco Nara cubes has lasted me in the past.
For me, the true test was going to be when the coals finally did burn out and needed replacing.
For some reason, every time I use the Coco Nara cubes, I get a whole lot of nasty burnt harshness when I first replace the coals, and have to spend about a minute clearing things out and managing the coals before it gets good again, a problem I never had with the flat Coco Naras, although I am getting better at this and lately haven't had this problem. Since I'm still getting used to the Coco Nara cubes, I figure this is just the same as learning to manage heat properly when I transitioned from quick light coals to natural coals. Even though it's the same product, the size and mass change the heat properties, so I just need to get used to it.
However, if this thing was able to fix that problem, then in my mind it would be worth the extra ~15 seconds of setup time needed.
Well, it didn't.
But instead of nasty burnt harshness, I got that same lungful-of-smog feeling, but this time it took a lot less time to clear out and get back to enjoying the deliciousness of my Romman blueberry + mint.
However, as I'm also completely inexperienced with the "cooking" method of smoking shisha that the Hookah Flip offers, I'm willing to chalk that up to a newbie mistake.
Ultimately, I feel it's a bit too early for me to pass judgement on this device, simply because I'm still inexperienced in using it. I'll continue to smoke out of it over the coming days & weeks to see if it gets any easier to manage, and also if I can't figure out how to eliminate that lungful-of-smog feeling entirely. If I had to take a wager, I'd say I just set the coals up too close to the bowl to start.
I would, however, like to offer 2 observations I'd made while smoking from the Hookah Flip, and I'll let these 2 pictures do most of the talking:
In the top picture, you can see a bunch of tobacco leaves somehow managed to find their way into the base. While I've had this happen occasionally with a regular phunnel bowl, I understand that gravity is still working in favor of things falling into the base. But with this contraption, where the bowl is hanging upside down, you'd think this wouldn't happen. I don't know if I just over-packed the bowl, or I happen to have incredible powers of suction (hey-oh!), but that struck me as odd.
The second picture I feel shows something a little more concerning, which relates to the Hookah Flip's purported ability to create "purer, charcoal free smoke, by cooking the tobacco rather than burning it." While this may sound good in theory, anyone who cooks should know that overcooking something leads to burning, and in the case of this shisha tobacco, the end result is the same charred mass of crispy blackness that I get when smoking out of a regular bowl.
That said, even if this contraption doesn't change anything else about my hookah smoking experience, it certainly seems to make the coals last longer, but the tobacco seems to last just as long as it would in a regular bowl of equivalent size. It just took 2 sets of coals rather than 3 to get through the entire bowl.
