I'll apologize for not giving you the detail you were looking for but I'm going to wear being compared to Obie with a ridiculous amount of pride. :cool:
I probably should have been a bit clearer in that the change in bowl helped a bit but I didn't have any real issues in the original wood bowl. I've used both of my "art brushes" on this soap at this point. The Tuxedo synthetic has relatively stiff backbone with very soft tips, the Cashmere synthetic is ridiculously soft with extremely plush tips and minimal backbone. If you haven't figured it out yet I've learned that I'm pretty scritch adverse and tend towards brushes with rather soft tips.
Since you're having problems I'll detail my slightly unorthodox routine. I start by covering the puck in water and allowing the soap to bloom while I shower (I'm an early riser so the razor for the day gets stropped the night before). I have a water softener so I don't have hard water issues and cold to lukewarm water is what I aim for out of the tap. Once out I pour off the bloom water and reserve it as I kinda hate dumping off water that is saturated with soap. The brush is dipped in the reserve and the knot is given a couple of gentle squeezes to remove the bulk of the water. Keep in mind that I'm using synthetic brushes here so they don't hold onto water like a badger knot does, which is why I generally don't shake my brush.
This is where things get a little unorthodox as you might call me a "double bowl" latherer. Most of my soaps currently reside in some cheap, Chinese, stainless steel bowls I procured from Ebay (I can link if anyone is interested). These bowls are just a bit taller than the pucks and have a circumference that leaves about a quarter to a half inch gap between the puck and the rim of the bowl (trying to be as clear as I can here). When I start my laps I'm not trying for the perfect lather, I'm merely looking to begin generating a decent quantity of lather that may be dryer that I'm looking to shave with. If the brush is too dry I dip my tips back in the reserve until I start generating a reasonable amount of suds. Keep in mind that during this process the lather tends to run off the puck and into that trough between the soap and the rim of the bowl, I'm essentially collecting a thick lather around the puck and loading the brush. I also like that this tends to keep my fingers relatively clean and I'm not dumping lather down the drain.
Phase two takes place in a mug, my daily go-to is a small-ish, slightly short mug I obtained from IKEA for about 70 cents U.S. I know that this mug is taller and narrower than most guys like but I prefer its shape for developing my lather into the consistency I'm looking for. The lather I built up in the original bowl is now scooped out with my brush and transferred to the mug and I begin developing the rather thick, pasty lather into what I want to apply to my face. Hydration comes from dipping brush tips back into the reserve water and I tend to be careful to add that water slowly. It is a very rare occurrence that I add too much but when I do it usually isn't a disaster of sudsy water but more often just a lather that is a bit on the runny side.
During my shave I generally don't have to go back to the puck and if more water is needed the reserve bloom water is still sitting on the sink. I started using the reserve water trick a while back and my preference for this method has become threefold. The first is that this water is saturated with soap so while I'm adding water I'm also reinforcing the lather with some additional soap. The second is that dipping tips tends to offer me more control than water added from the tap, I rarely go too far and wind up with a sloppy mess. At worst I generally can do some laps on the puck and bring the lather back to where I want it rather rapidly. Last but not least I hate to dump perfectly good soapy water down the drain when I can put it to use building a lather. This last one has gone so far that I've actually considered using my reserve to bloom the soap on the following day but I've resisted going that far down the rabbit hole as of yet.
Travel is a bit different and is still a work in progress for me as I don't travel terribly often. At this point I have had good results using a sample puck in a full-sized plastic tub (I bought a few from Maggards but the plastic bowls Stirling and other producers use are essentially the same). I bloom my soap as usual, pour off the water and then build my lather right on the puck. In this case I also tend to some face lathering techniques but, as I said, I'm still figuring out this variation of my shave routine.
One final tip if you still have issues building a lather. On soaps that give me difficulty I use a trick that I picked up from some random member around here (and I wish I could give that gentleman the credit) and that's to reserve your lather. Seriously, at the end of your shave scoop up any lather left in your mug, bowl or scuttle and gently squeeze it and the lather in your brush back onto the puck. This might not be the most hygienic approach but I don't (or rarely, at least) share my soaps and I generally finish with both witch hazel and a splash. What it does do is give me a bit of soap that is essentially greater saturation for my reserve and provides the initial base for my lather.
Okay, this post is long and a bit off-topic. Obie, seeing as you're the mod in these here parts, please feel free to move this post to its own thread if warranted.