If you want to enjoy your hookah, you need to observe a set of tips. These tips include:

Wash your hookah between uses

You can have the best hookah ingredients, but if you let the leftover juice, tobacco bits, and water sit in your vase for days, you won’t enjoy your smoking.

For a great experience, make it a habit to clean your hookah between uses. You can get away with rinsing the hookah components under running water, but if the parts are too dirty, soak them in warm water for at least 30 minutes.

After soaking, scrub them using a soft brush paying attention to any stubborn areas.

Use the right base cocktails.

You can give your hookah an interesting flavor using cocktails. Some of the popular ones are fruits, spices, and herbs.

To stay safe, stick to tested and proven cocktails. This calls for you to avoid less popular cocktails such as milk, acidic fruits (like lemons, limes, plums, and grapefruit), and alcohol.

When the milk reaches 45 degrees Fahrenheit, bacteria grow, making your hookah unhygienic. On the other hand, highly acidic juices can hurt the quality and finish of your downstream, and it’s dangerous to inhale alcohol in small spaces for long periods.

Purge before your session.

When set up right, hookahs should be airtight, but people tend to trap negative air pressure when putting everything together.

For this reason, you should purge your hookah before you start your sessions. Purging before you begin smoking gives your hookah a chance to get rid of the old air. You also have a chance to check the water level and the purge to ensure nothing goes wrong.

You also can light your charcoal from the bottom up and check the airflow of your pack.

Don’t place ice inside your hookah.

One of the most common hookah myths is that ice makes the smoke smoother. Unfortunately, this isn’t true.

While this is the case, this is not to say that ice doesn’t have its place. It has, but it’s not in your hookah—it’s outside.

If you smoke outside during the summer and need to cool down your hookah water, put it in the middle of an ice bucket with regular table salt.

If you put the ice outside of your hookah, it won’t melt as quickly when you pull on it, and the salt will keep the ice colder for longer, so you can have more fun in the sun.

Keep the accessories.

It’s common to have some hookahs that aren’t working. Many people throw away their malfunctioning units, but you shouldn’t. You should keep the grommets, purge balls, hose port connectors, and other hookah accessories.

This is because many stores only sometimes have the accessories as they are always in high demand. This means that you can easily fail to smoke due to a lack of accessories.

When you keep even the broken hookahs, you have peace of mind that you can take one part from one hookah and replace the damaged part.

Pack below the rim

You shouldn’t just pack your hookah tobacco—you need to be strategic in how you do it. A good rule of thumb is to pack below the rim. When you do this, you let the heat move from the charcoal to the clay, making the flavor stronger and the smoking experience fun.

Packing below the rim also gives your tobacco room to grow and shrink as it cooks, making it easier to clean up and more likely that you use all of the tobacco you packed.

For the best outcome, ensure that the Heat Management Devices (HMDs) and foil start 2mm below the rim.

Use a sponge to plug holes.

Some people call them “Steel Mesh,” but stainless steel sponges are important for your fruit bowl sessions, not just for cleaning the grime off your used hookah bowls.

Many people use toothpicks to decorate and add details to their fruit bowls. Instead of using toothpicks, use stainless steel sponges to save you time and simplify the whole process.

Instead of carefully lining up each toothpick and making sure that the gap between the tobacco and the stem is sealed, you can just cut a piece of sponge and use it to plug the hole you made.

Treat the flavors as ingredients.

If you love your hookah in different flavors, you have to add the ingredients that will give you the different flavors you are after.

When creating the flavors, always think about the hookah’s base, as it plays a crucial role in the overall smoke flavor. There is no specific way to mix the different flavors, but you should ensure that you use the right amount of flavoring.

The reason is that the hookah flavors come in concentrated forms, and if you don’t measure them correctly, you can easily give your hookah an unpleasant taste.

For the best experience, ensure that every flavor you use is high quality and from a reputable brand.

Ensure your charcoal is fully lit.

Let’s be honest. Lighting charcoal is always the worst part of setting up a hookah, but it’s still an important step. If you use underlit charcoal for your session, you’re more likely to have trouble controlling the heat.

You also tend to have the taste of charcoal in your smoke instead of your desired flavor. You’re also more likely to burn the charcoal out completely.

The right way to go about it is to ensure that the charcoal is fully lit before you start your smoking session. This way, you have better flavor as the charcoal burns more evenly, producing consistent heat that heats your ingredients evenly, giving you a better flavor.

A fully lit charcoal has also been found not to produce harmful chemicals such as carbon monoxide. This means that you have fewer chances of inhaling these toxic chemicals.

Finally, a fully lit charcoal doesn’t produce harsh smoke that can irritate your lungs and throat. The smoother smoke produced by the fully lit charcoal ensures you enjoy your smoke sessions and flavors.