The artisans who craft your cigars spend countless hours tending to tobacco fields, curing their products in precise conditions, and then meticulously rolling the sticks to ensure the complex aromas and tastes convey themselves in just the right way.
Your job as a cigar appreciator isn’t quite so hard. Your job is to honor that artisanal process by treating the product with care. For your efforts, you’ll be rewarded with a satisfying smoking experience – just as the craftspeople intended.
Here are the five essential tools you need to pull it off.
A Cedar-Lined Humidor
This is, inarguably, one of the most essential tools in your arsenal. Without a tightly sealed humidor, your cigars live “in the wilderness,” so speak – susceptible to pests, oxygenation, and humidity fluctuations.
Most experts prefer humidors lined with Spanish cedar primarily due to the wood’s excellent moisture retention properties, which help maintain stable humidity levels crucial for preserving cigars. The wood’s natural aromatic qualities subtly enhance the flavor of cigars without overpowering them, while its oils act as a natural repellent against pests like tobacco beetles.
Boveda 2-Way Moisture Control Packs
Even the best, most tightly sealed humidors can’t regulate humidity fluctuations entirely. If the ambient relative humidity surrounding the humidor is overly dry or moist, it will eventually dry the cigars out or catalyze mold growth, respectively.
That’s why any expert will tell you that you need a Boveda pack to stabilize the humidity levels in your humidor. These 2-way humidity control packs maintain a predetermined relative humidity in the enclosed space by emitting or absorbing moisture.
A Precision Cigar Cutter
A sharp, precise cutter is critical to a good cigar experience. When you cut a cigar with a dull blade, you exert force rather than shearing. This force can compress the filling and crack the wrapper, leaving you with a compromised cigar.
Luckily, cutters – even quality options – aren’t expensive. Choose a guillotine, V-cutter or punch cutter from a reputable brand like Xikar or Colibri. These should run you around $30 and stay sharp for quite a while (some even come with a warranty).
A Reliable Cigar Lighter
Cigar experts warn against using average isobutane or lighter fluid lighter, like most Bics and Zippos. These products leave a noticeably fuel-like aftertaste and tend to produce an inconsistent flame. They will do in a pinch, but aficionados stock a lighter with a little more… firepower.
The ideal choice is a butane, “jet-style” torch lighter. Dunhill, Dupont, Xikar, and Rocky Patel each make fantastic lighters explicitly engineered for cigar use.
A Cigar Ashtray
At first blush, an ashtray might not seem important. It’s just a vessel to put the spent ash from your cigar, right?
However, a quality ashtray elevates the smoking experience in a few ways. First, it functions as a stable, sturdy place to rest your cigar between draws, ensuring the stogie doesn’t roll, fall, or come into contact with debris. Second, a dedicated cigar ashtray features slot sizes big enough to fit a cigar gauge, allowing you to extinguish the cigar naturally. Third – maybe most important – a cigar ashtray makes a statement about your personal taste and style, improving the overall aesthetics and ambience of your smoking experience.
If you want to elevate your smoking experience, enjoying the richness and structure of the cigars as its artisans intended, consider stocking your toolkit with the essentials above.
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