The Hippie Pipe Review – A Dynavap Competitor?

How it Works – How to heat the Hippie Pipe

Credit to some clever engineering, the spring-loaded loading zone allows you to stuff in ~0.15 grams of flower, about the same as a Dynavap tip. We’re definitely fond of the loading and unloading action on this unit. Simply have some ground up herb and use the extended nose of the unit to load in your flower.

From here you simply need to heat the tip with any heat source – preferably a butane torch and wait for the indicator to shift from red to black. Seems fairly simple, right?

Once the indicator shifts, your session should be ready to go and all you need to do is inhale. It’ll shift back from black to red when it has cooled down. In theory, this sounds excellent.

In practice, it doesn’t quite work out that way and we’ve combusted multiple times while waiting for the indicator to show its colors in both directions. The cooldown takes far too long and it just didn’t work consistently for us while the heat-up cycle was either too slow or too quick.

Temperature Flexibility – Torch Life

If you’ve read our Dynavap M 2021 review, you’re already familiar with manually controlled units. Just like the Dynavap M, you do have a say as to the temperature it sits at. This is only really applicable to highly-experienced herb vaporizer users, as newbies will have a hard time understanding how to heat it up to low or high temperatures while still getting proper results.

With the Dynavap M, at least you have two clicks to approximate temperature with. The Hippie Pipe is either on or off, with not much in the way for accurate indication between either-or.

So yes, you do have full temperature control, but in practice, you’re pretty limited by the difficulty of achieving such.

Vapor Quality – How does it compare to others?

When we got it working, it actually works fairly well. The flavor is quite reminiscent of that from the Dynavap and provides a full-bodied conduction hit with a nice representation of flavor and hit size.

The majority of the time however we either combusted, got nothing at all, or got very wispy hits. Inconsistent to say the least – we consider ourselves to be well versed with manual herb vaporizers of all sorts and truthfully had a very difficult time with it.

Manufacturing Quality – Is it as sturdy as a Dynavap?

We like design. Though it clearly takes some inspiration from a Dynavap, we appreciate the engineering behind the loading chamber and the color-changing indicator.

Though we’ve got to say – deep red and black are pretty poor colors to choose from. In the nighttime or mediocre lighting, you’re going to have a real hard time distinguishing if your hit is ready or not.

The rest of the device is really nice. Ebony blackwood, carbon fiber, stainless steel – they’ve got the design down right and we commend them for that. The quality feels great and it certainly feels like a premium device considering the price paid for it.

Portability – Pocket Friendly Hippie!

It’s a really small unit, just like the Dynavap, and can be taken practically anywhere for a session. We like to store ours in a sort of ‘doob tube’ to keep it protected and smell-proof. Of course, you’ll need to budget in some room for a torch lighter and a place to carry your herb as well.

All in all, it occupies a small carry volume and we enjoy it for that.

Ease of Use – Learning Curve?

Disappointingly, the Hippie Pipe fails to be simple to use.

The indicator is not quite accurate or effective and trying to get hits with it, as a result, is a frustrating process. We’d essentially never take this unit out of the house for use on the go or sharing – a shame because we’re so fond of the design.

Discreetness – All its cracked up to be?

It appears closer to a joint than most vaporizers out there do, with the downside of looking like a crack pipe if you’re heating it in public with a torch for any period of time. Sound familiar with the Dynavap at all?

Yeah, we wouldn’t quite use this in public lest you want to bring unwanted attention to yourself while you cram yourself into a corner or public bench and try to heat it up.

Overall Experience

So close, yet so far. To us, the Hippie Pipe in its current state feels like a Beta or even Alpha test unit. The frequency of combustion, inconsistency with the heating indicator, and overall effectiveness of the design just needs to be worked on.

We’re very fond of the design and creativity behind the unit and hope to see a new revision or two come out with improvements.

It’s hard to recommend in its current state and unless you’re a real herb vape aficionado, you’d be better served by a device like the Utillian 421 or Dynavap M for a first vape.

If you have questions about our Hippie Pipe review or just want to let us know what you think, feel free to drop us a comment below! Thanks for reading and as always, keep vapin’!