It seems funny that people want high figure and contrast in their wood grips but zero figure and contrast in their cork grips. If you just want a vanilla cork grip with none of the things that identify it as cork why not just use balsa or some light white pine? If you still want the ring look, just a hole saw to bore standard size rings from either.

I have never tried the birch bark for grips, I like the look and would love to get some to experiment with. I don't however think that anything will ever replace good cork for fly rod grips. Nothing else has the same feel or look.

Although, for sheer performance and efficiency, the carbon-fiber foam-core grips beat the stuffing out of cork. The difference is effort vs results is truly amazing. Not to mention the uptick in sensitivity.

..........

Following up on what Tom wrote, this year for the first time I put together a few foam front grips with fiberglass sheaths and custom painted them. It was more for decorative reasons than anything else - they were going on trolling rods that sit in rod holders all day long. I was sort of surprised to hear the customer's first feedback comment being about how much more sensitive the rod felt when landing fish. That's not the kind of feedback you would expect from a 8' long moderate action composite rod blank used to winch in fish from a trolling boat.

I'll probably do more of these in the future paired up with hypalon rear grips to stand up to rod holder abuse.

As to Roger's original post, I haven't done a cork grip in the last 20 or so rods for customers, although all my personal trolling rods have cork front grips.