Hookah Love Blog

Welcome to our series on bowl loading and heat maintenance! In the previous blog, Bowl me over: tips on loading and tending a hookah bowl, we gave some general guidelines on loading a great bowl of shisha. In this one, we’ll discuss heat management and coal rotation made easy. By this point, you should have your loaded bowl with the foil or screen in place on the hookah.

Once the coals are ready (fully glowing, without black showing on the surface), they’re ready to go on the bowl. It will often take several draws through the hookah before the tobacco is sufficiently heated to smoke. Once you began drawing smoke, you’ll want to pay careful attention to the taste of the smoke, and the smell in the air. If the shisha begins to overheat or burn, the change in the taste and smell will be the first indications that the coals need to be “rotated”.  Rotating coal simply means moving it to a new part on the bowl to heat up a cooler section of the bowl, and cool a hotter section of the bowl.  Smoke rising out of the bowl also indicates overheated shisha, and the need to rotate the coals. If the smoke becomes very harsh, you may need to remove the coal from the top of the bowl for several minutes as the tobacco cools down before replacing the coal and trying the smoke again.

You’ll want to avoid placing coal directly in the center of the bowl until the very end of the bowl or session. Because coal radiates heat in all directions, the center of the bowl is always receiving some of the heat from the coals around the edge, but if coal is placed directly in the center, too much heat is radiated into the tobacco, and it will quickly begin to burn.

Once the coals burn down to small embers, they emit less heat than larger pieces and you will need to add fresh coal to maintain the temperature of the bowl. When adding a fresh coal to the bowl, I find it helpful to balance the heat by placing the embers adjacent to the fresh coal, moving the embers side-by-side around the bowl together (as one would move a single coal).

As personal preference, I like to place a new coal so near the rim of the bowl that part of the coal hangs off the edge. One may consider this a very ‘gentle’ way to heat the bowl because the least amount of heat transfers from the coal to the bowl; I find that heating the bowl more slowly decreases the chances of burning the tobacco and facilitates the balance of heat.

For ease of heat maintenance and cleanliness, you should scrape or gently blow the ash off of the surface of the foil when needed. Don’t worry about ash falling through the holes of the screen or foil, for very little ash will fall through, and it won’t fall any lower than the surface of the top layer of tobacco. The tiny amount of ash that falls through won’t impact the flavor or texture of the smoke. You may also want to knock ash off of the coal periodically by picking it up with the tongs and dropping it in the tray a few times. As the coal hits the tray, the outermost layers of ash will be knocked into the tray, and the clean coal is ready to be replaced on the bowl.

Bear in mind, too, that there are almost as many unique ways to manage a bowl as there are unique smokers out there. This guide is one easy way to tend a hookah bowl, but don’t be afraid to adjust this system as you see fit! By experimenting with the way you load and tend a bowl, you’ll develop your own feel for your hookah and gain experience invaluable to smoking perfect bowls.

For specific information about each bowl style, don’t miss our blog The Incredi-bowls: Hookah Bowl Styles and Shapes

Would you like to learn more about the chemistry behind the smoke, or general hookah mechanics? Check out our blog on How to Smoke a Hookah: hookah charcoal and heat maintenance to read what happens on the inside of the hookah bowl.

We’ve also taste-tested every brand we carry when composing the Shisha Shisha Everywhere, Which One Do I Smoke? blog.