Cigar Watch

Chief@CigarWatch.info
www.CigarWatch.info

Like anybody else, cigar makers have their own jargon. A cigar may look like a relatively simple thing - at least form the outside - but nothing could be farther from the truth. A well made cigar is an exquisite balance - a combination of the arts of the grower, ager, blender and roller. A lot goes into the construction of your stogie - a lot of care and many quality checks - before it gets to you. So let’s take a tour.

• Cap: The cap is the very tip of the ‘near end’ of your cigar - the end that goes into your mouth. There are a few types of caps - triples and pigtails being the most notable - but most caps are a scrap of wrapper applied to the end of the cigar to seal it. The cap is what you cut before your light up.
• Head: The head is the part of the cigar that the cap sits on. It is designed to feel comfortable in your mouth and to allow a good flow during the draw. Heads can be the normal rounded ones that you mostly see or the tapered ones called torpedoes. The construction of this part of the cigar is important when you are doing a cigar rating - how the stogie feels in your mouth is part of that process.
• Body: This the the bulk of the cigar - between the head and the ‘far end’. When you are doing a cigar rating, you pay a lot of attention to the body. Most smokers use the ‘pinch test’ to assess the construction of the cigar - feeling for firmness or softness along the way - looking for hard spots or spongy spots.
• Tuck or Foot: This is the ‘far end’ or ‘fire end’ of the cigar. It can be clean cut, shaggy or tucked in. Most cigars have a clean cut foot - although shaggy and tucked seem to be making a comeback. A shaggy foot shows the filler sticking out beyond the wrapper and binder while a tuck has the wrapper folded over at the foot.

Well, thats it for the outside of your cigar - now lets take a look at the inner structure.

• Filler: These are the long leaves of tobacco that make up the bulk of your cigar. Long filler means that the leaves mostly rung the entire length of your smoke. Short fillers are chopped up leaves - mostly a sign of a lower quality or machine made stogie.
• Binder: The binder is a tough, coarse leaf of tobacco that holds the filler together and in the correct shape.
• Wrapper: This is the silky half-leaf that surrounds you cigar and makes it look attractive and feel good in your hands.

When our cigar club meets there is a lot of discussion of the structure of the cigars - a lot of focus on how to smoke a cigar. And those discussions always start with the look and feel of the stogies. Get to know something about how your cigars are made - the effort and art that goes into their making - and your will enjoy your herfing even more.

Cigar Watch helps you sort out these things by providing cigar ratings, information on how to smoke a cigar and enjoy the experience and tips on how to identify fake cigars. We are a cigar club whose members contribute reviews of their favorite stogies and rant or rave about their experiences with smokes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.