Hosting a shisha night: what you need

Hosting a shisha night stands or falls on the preparation, and that preparation is about numbers. How many hookahs do you set up, how much charcoal will you get through, how many flavors are enough. Those are the questions you do not want to be answering halfway through the evening.

Below are the numbers we work with ourselves, with a timeline alongside them. If you do not yet know how to set up a hookah, start with the setup guide for beginners and come back here afterwards.

How many hookahs do you need

Hosting a shisha night starts with the number of guests. Divide that by three and round up. One hookah comfortably serves two to three people: everyone gets a turn often enough without the bowl burning out before the last person has drawn.

With four guests you can manage with one hookah, but it is more sociable with two. From six onwards you set up two. An alternative is a model with two or more hose connections, so two people smoke from the same bowl at once. That saves space and charcoal, but the bowl is spent sooner.

Two hoses on one bowl or two separate hookahs

Two connections are handy if space is tight. Two separate hookahs are better if you want to run different flavors, and with a group you nearly always do. With two setups one can stay fresh while the other goes sweet.

Charcoal: how much do you get through in an evening

The hardest part of hosting a shisha night is this calculation, and it is where people most often come up short. Count three coconut coals per bowl, and a full swap every forty minutes. A coal burns for sixty to ninety minutes, but the last twenty of those give too little heat to keep the flavor good.

Working it out per hour

Three coals per swap, one and a half swaps per hour, comes to a little over four coals per hour per hookah. For an evening of four hours that is eighteen coals per hookah, plus a few spare because a coal always breaks or rolls off the foil.

• One hookah, four hours: around 18 coals
• Two hookahs, four hours: around 36 coals
• Three hookahs, four hours: around 54 coals

A box of 54 pieces therefore covers exactly one evening with three hookahs. Buy a three kilo value pack and you are at over a hundred and fifty coals, enough for several evenings.

Coconut or quick-light charcoal for a group

For an evening at home you choose coconut charcoal: longer burn time and no aftertaste. Quick-light charcoal is handy if you have no burner or you are sitting outside, but it burns for twenty-five to forty minutes and gives the first draws a slight chemical taste. In a group more people notice that, and first impressions count.

Choosing flavors a whole group can live with

You can host a shisha night with four flavors, but that is rarely an improvement. Do not do it. Two flavors that sit far apart work better than four that resemble each other, because then there is always an alternative that genuinely tastes different.

Two flavors that sit far apart

Take one fresh and one sweet. Something minty or citrus on one side, something fruity or dessert-like on the other. Anyone who finds the first too sharp moves to the second, and the other way round. All shisha flavors we sell online are tobacco-free and nicotine-free, so you do not have to take that into account when you invite people.

Count on about twenty grams of flavor per bowl fill. A 120 gram jar is therefore good for around six fills, comfortably enough for one evening.

Sharing mouthpieces and hoses without the awkwardness

This is the part people talk around and that is settled in two minutes. Lay out a hygienic mouthpiece for each person. They are plastic caps that slide over the mouthpiece of the hose, they cost a few cents each, and nobody has to say anything about it.

If you have regular guests, a personal hose each is the more comfortable answer. A washable silicone hose can be rinsed through afterwards; a leather one cannot, and it takes on the taste of the previous session.

The setup: where do you put the hookah

A hookah belongs on the floor or on a low table, not on the dining table. The hose has to hang downwards without kinking, and the base stands more steadily on a flat surface than on a tablecloth.

Space, ventilation and the tongs

Keep a metre clear around the hookah so nobody catches a leg behind it. Make sure a window can open: not because the smoke is dangerous, but because a group in a closed room tastes nothing after an hour. And lay out charcoal tongs of at least thirty centimetres. With short tongs your knuckles hang just above a coal at eight hundred degrees.

A timeline for the evening

What makes hosting a shisha night easy is starting an hour earlier. Anyone who does that has nothing left to arrange during the evening.

About an hour before people arrive, put the water in the bases and fill the bowls. Twenty minutes before arrival the first coals go on the burner, because those need eight to ten minutes. By the time the first guest walks in there is a session ready instead of a kit to assemble.

After that it is a matter of swapping coals every forty minutes and emptying and refilling the bowl after two sessions. Empty the bases straight away at the end: leftover water with juice in it smells sharp the next day and makes the next session dull. Why juice, milk and soda do not really belong in the base is explained in what to put in the base, and what not.

What usually goes wrong

Three things keep coming back when hosting a shisha night. Too little charcoal bought in, so the evening stalls halfway. Too many coals on the bowl at once, so the flavor turns bitter within ten minutes. And a bowl packed too tightly, so the whole setup draws hard and everyone thinks the hookah is broken.

That last one is the most annoying, because it looks like a technical problem while it is a packing problem. Pack loosely, press nothing down, and leave a few millimetres to the rim.

Everything for your shisha night at ShishaTabak

At ShishaTabak you will find everything that has to be on the table: hookahs with one or more connections, tobacco-free shisha flavors, coconut charcoal by the box or the value pack, hygienic mouthpieces and charcoal tongs.

Ordered before 18:00 arrives the next day within the Netherlands, with free shipping from 89.99 euro. That way everything is ready in time for the evening you are planning.