What's Your Preferred Hookah Material?

[Victim026]

Deltr you live in San Antonio? How long have you been going to Shisha Cafe? I used to go there all the time and then the owner was a complete asshole to me even though I was there 6 nights a week. I've moved over to Al-Araibi's on Babcock and Callaghan, you should come give it a try some night.

[Sonthert]

Allia, true, but I think the reactivity of aluminum is what's at issue here.

Fishman (I always liked permutations of that name, like Sgt. Fish on Barney Miller! ): Is the aluminum anodized on the inside, too? If it isn't...

I have yet to see a stainless steel hookah. There's coated steel hookahs, but coated steel is not stainless steel. Stainless steel is a seemless alloy of metals, not a sandwich.

The other clarifying piece of logic I came up with, after the fact, until six years ago or so, brass (copper) was abundant and cheap and all hookahs were made from it. As the price of brass went up, hookahs started transitioning from all brass to brass core (I have some older Egyptian shanks that have brass cores...look normal until you look at the color of the downstem). Then came steel hookahs and finally aluminum ones. If brass was still cheap...wouldn't they be still making hookahs out of it? So aluminum is a metal to go to if you can't affordably get the preferred metal (brass), therefore it is not the best metal for the application, therefore it is crap metal (for the application) although it is a wonderful metal in so many ways. In fact, I wanted to change my name to Al, in honor of aluminum.