Why are the morta pipes so expensive?
Morta is expensive because it’s not harvested by a professional mill that has year-round access to the stock with warehouses of burls and legions of workers. It’s a one-man operation and can only be done once a year. When the water levels are low in early Fall, one must prowl the marsh and find each log under the surface, then mark them and return with shovels, diggers, and a crane to extricate the wood. It’s a long process that takes a couple of weeks, plus the costs of storing and drying the wood myself over the course of years. Outside of this short Autumn window of opportunity, morta is unreachable throughout the rest of the year. Between equipment rentals, storage, time lost, etc, the wood ends up with a per-block cost that puts the most expensive briar to shame. To my knowledge, Austrian pipemaker Joseph Prammer and myself are the only pipemakers in the world who create morta pipes, though I have heard that Peterson used Irish morta many decades ago. Other morta exists but it can
