Cigar Watch

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Most herfers had some kind of storage arrangement for their smokes - either in their home or at a local cigar shop. These are the ‘bed’ that your stogies rest in while waiting their turn. The conditions within these ‘micro-habitats’ are critical to the well being of your investments - and your enjoyment of them. Many herfers focus on learning how to smoke a cigar and pay precious little attention to their storage.

For those of us who buy more than we can smoke withing a couple of days - that that is most of us - the problem of maintaining our stock in the proper humidity and temperature range can be a real challenge - particularly if you live in a area that has wide swings of both during the course of a year. Wandering very far from the ideal humidity and temperature can quickly spoil your stock.

So what are the ideal conditions for storage? Well, let’s start with the 70/70 rule. Keep your cigars in an environment which is a constant 70 percent humidity and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s from the time you get them home to the time you smoke them. The word ‘constant’ is vitally important here. Stogies do not do well when humidity fluctuates wildly. And there is a very good reason for that - aside from the damage it does to the taste of the smoke - you see the components of a cigar expand and contract at different rates. While the filler gleefully expands when humidity increases, the binder and wrapper don’t - so you end up with an exploding cigar. Anybody who has been given a prize stick - who have carefully put it into a humidor to ‘rest’ before smoking - and returned to find an exploded mess - know what I’m talking about.

So how do you keep the humidity at 70%. Well you start with the storage container. An old cigar box is not going to do it - and that includes the one the came in unless it was specifically built as a humidor. Most humidors are made of wood - some solid cedar and others cedar lined. These are designed to give your smokes a slight woody taste. Others are made of different kinds of wood - with glass fronts and drawers. The single most important thing about all of these is that the lid should close completely - provide a seal when the lid is closed. When you close a good humidor you can feel the resistance in the last small part of an inch before it closes. If you humidor does not seal well it will take a lot more to keep it up to that 70% level.

I have several wooden humidors for sticks that I plan to smoke within the coming month. But my long term storage is plastic - that’s right plastic! I use coolers - the kind with a latching lid - for my long term storage. First, they are cheap and provide lots of storage space. Second, most are square and boxes fit into them neatly and compactly. And third - and this is the most important part - they are easy to keep in the correct humidity range. Finally, my coolers put some of my smokes out of sight and out of mind. That has allowed me to ‘put up’ sticks for over a year and then go back and ‘rediscover’ them. Almost always they have improved - and I have benefited with a much smoother and tasteful smoke.

Well, now that you have your storage how do you keep the humidity at the magic 70%? There are all sorts of humidifiers on the market. They range from the foam that florists use to stick flowers in to more sophisticated systems. But I have a solution that beats them all hands down. One of the materials that came out of the space program had the characteristics of absorbing moisture and letting it out so as to maintain a constant humidity. There are several sources that put these crystals in tubes which fit into your humidor trays along with your cigars. If you go to your local cigar store you will probably see them on sale. But here is a tip that will make the time you have spent reading this article very profitable. There is a seller on e-Bay who has them at a price which is very good. Click here to be taken to their e-Bay store.

So what’s so good about these ‘wet sticks’? Well, first of all you charge them with regular tap water - no messing with distilled water. I just drop them into the sink and fill it with water - 15 minutes later they are ready to go. Second, they last for a long time. My own humidors are pretty good at retaining humidity and I get about 6 weeks between charging for the tubes. Finally they are east to adjust. I take out tubes as the summer humidity settles in and put more in as winter arrives. That keeps the 6 week cycle going and I like having to bother only every month and a half.

One final point - the meter. I am not a fan of those cheap analogue gauges. I have found them unreliable and difficult to calibrate. Make an investment in a digital meter for each of your humidors. They are battery operated and much more reliable.

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 Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 10:26 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.