Cutting VS Punching: A beginners’ guide to cigar care.

Cutting VS Punching

I hear people rant on and on about the proper technique for preparing cigars to be smoked. To Cut or to Punch; the big debate.

Cutting is the act of using a specially designed cutting tool (usually called a Guillotine Blade or Knife) or any scissor-like device to snip the drawing end off a cigar being prepared. I find this technique to be primitive and unrefined in most cases!

For torpedo shaped cigars this tends to be the only way, and as a result, I have a tendency to shy away from torpedoes, and instead use their round-shaped doppleganger that cigar manufacturers tend to make and sell alongside their streamlined brethren. However, I have seen chisel-end or “chiselito” cigars (shaped like a torpedo but squashed, forming a new shape like a chisel) actually punched on the top and bottom of the chisel! This seems like a very cool, creative idea, and the person I met who did it swore by chiselitos for my same reasoning: they didn’t like cutting either, but enjoyed tapered cigars.

Another technique is to use a device called a “Punch” which, if you can imagine, is a small circle of sharpened metal, that is gently pressed into the end of a cigar, twisted slightly, and if the blade is sharp enough, will cause a perfect, approximately quarter inch circle to be “punched” into the drawing end of a cigar. I am a big supporter of this technique for a handful of reasons:

1. The act of punching the end of the cigar does not compromise the structure and integrity of the cigar wrapper/binder.
2. Little mess is left to be cleaned up prior to smoking (If not cautious, sometimes guillotine blades can literally throw the cut ends of cigars any direction they prefer, tossing bits of tobacco everywhere, which I consider rude).
3. Very rarely does the act of punching cause small flakes or pieces of the wrapper/filler to come loose during smoking and find their way into my mouth, unlike cutting, which I find frequently leaves trailings of tobacco that are later to be “discovered” like little unwanted treasures floating around the tip of my tongue.
4. It usually causes a overall tighter draw when smoking a cigar, which makes it easier for me to maintain proper ember temperature, preventing me from scorching the tobacco surrounding the ember. I find this preserves flavor and lengthens the duration of the cigar.
5. I think its more aesthetically pleasing.

However, there are many a loud and vociferous voice fanatically opposing this type of cigar preparation. Some people have this theory about oils and “waste smoke” building up behind the punched area, causing poor flavor qualities and overall degradation of the quality of smoke experienced.

Superstitious Poppycock! Since I started smoking cigars almost 5 years ago, and at the rate of around 100 cigars a year (averaging one every 3.5 days, unless liquid assets are scarce, bills before hobbies!), my first year using mostly a guillotine blade, and the rest using a punch, I have never noticed any significant quality discrepancy between a guillotine and a punch. Also, since switching to a punch, I have been forced to use a guillotine on occasion, on cigar brands I frequently smoke, and have never noticed any profound difference in quality inside said brands.

On the other hand, if you simply desire the limited positive aspects of a guillotine – a loose draw, an easily chew-able end (which I very much understand) and possibly even the look – then go for it! I lambaste guillotine, but the whole point of this blog is to discover the things YOU like, not just the things that I support.

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Cigar Care

Now, as for proper cigar care, this is a much easier decision.

Some things to remember:

This is a PRACTICAL care page, not an over-the-top bathe your cigars in gold flakes and worship them nightly in silk robes guide! I will do my best to guide you in a practical and economic fashion when caring for your cigars.

More money saved means more money for more cigars!!

Cigars need to be keep between 60-80 degrees Fahrenheit and between 65 and 75-80 percent humidity for their lifespan. A temperature kept above this for too long can occasionally cause wrappers to begin unraveling, and a temperature below this can cause unwrapping plus dehumidification because the air is unable to sustain a high enough concentration of water vapor. Any less or more humidity and similar problems can occur. All the cigar reviews on this blog are based off of cigars in their best possible state, i.e. have been properly kept at adequate temp. and humidity before consuming.

If you are new to the world of fine cigars, then here are some steps and procedures that I recommend to follow when caring for your newly acquired, and possibly quite expensive, hedonistic hobby:

Don’t feel pressured into buying a Humidor until your quite sure cigars are for you. Humidors can be a very costly, long term investment. I know people that have used their humidors for decades! The wood used to make them, usually a species of kiln-dried Spanish cedar, has the wonderful quality of storing cigar aromas and oils for years, allowing them to slowly build up and aid in the maturation of your precious commodity. Invest in Ziploc-type bags for your first few cigars, usually cigar stores tend to package your newly bought cigars in plastic baggies much more tasteful than your moms’ “leftover meatloaf” freezer bags. Keep these until you believe your ready to invest in a humidor. You can keep them at an adequate humidity level by purchasing little “travel” size humidifiers full of a silicate-type gel that holds water and imparts no flavor, slowly releasing humidity over a period of a few weeks. These are to be included in the bag with your cigars, and then sealed. I will elaborate more about humidors in my page “Humidors: What works for me?”

A good, stable temperature area for storing cigars pre-humidor can be found away from windows, and sometimes on top of appliances, usually away from air-vents or other sources of heat and excessive light. Refrigerators can be wonderful for this because the condensing coils sit on the rear-side of most fridges, allowing for a minute amount of waste heat to travel up the back, and over on top, causing a stable temperature conveniently ranging between 70-80 degrees!

Always make sure to store like cigars near each other, and unlike ones as far apart as possible, if you do not desire cross-cigar infusions to occur. Picture your humidor as a very wonderful, expensive potpourri container, that loves to mix and match flavors of cigars placed inside it. In some cases, this can be a wonderful thing! Placing cheaper cigars next to bolder, spicier, fuller-bodied cigars can help impart flavor from your favorites to ones you would rather hand out at weddings and baby births. This can be a great way to make a batch of cheaper cigars ready for that stint between cigars you more prefer, but are out of. It can also be a great way of making sure all your friends who come over and want to enjoy one of your cigars are not insulted by having you treat them to something YOU wouldn’t smoke! A rude cigar smoker is a lonely cigar smoker.

Do not place infused (Acids) or flavored (CAO, Java, Cohiba) cigars in the same humidor as your natural (Maduro, Natural, Cameroon, Sumatran etc.) cigars unless you have a strong desire for a spicy, coffee, strawberry, mint, rose flavored maduro! I recommend either a separate humidor for these kinds if your THAT interested in those kind of cigars (there ARE high quality brands) or just using a seal-able plastic container along with a travel humidifier. I would also recommend separating flavors and infused from each other all together.

***On a side note, not to be sexist, I find that offering an infused or flavored cigar to a beginning female smoker is a great way to help them segue into more “natural” cigars if that is their intention. It seems to me that offering something with less of a taste-curve is more beneficial to someone attempting to acquire an “acquired taste”. Truthfully, I find women more in need of this technique than men.

Also, along a similar note, attempt to stifle any “bright” ideas that may come to you involving “dipping” or “misting” your cigars with Tequilas, Scotches, Whiskeys and the like. Once the sanitizing alcohol evaporates away, the sugars left behind make an appetizing meal for many different types of fungi and bacteria. While your cigars attract only a select few strains of tobacco-loving bacteria and fungi (the bacteria strains mostly being the ones beneficial to the aging process), adding simple sugars to the wrapper of your cigars and then leaving them moist at room temperature is most assuredly NOT a good idea. Leave this type of Infusing and Flavoring up the experts. The same goes for using liquors and flavor additives to your humidifying materials, which will have the same result. If you so desire flavors, combine flavored cigars with others you intend to flavor. A good technique I came across on the grapevine is to: “Buy a nice smelling pipe-tobacco of your choice, one of the ‘aromatic’ kind, and spread it inside your humidor” The idea being, the coffee, maple, or other aromas of good aromatic pipe tobacco will happily transfer to the cigars of your liking, and with significant haste, as aromatic pipe-tobacco tends to be VERY, well, aromatic.

This is a great way to make ‘budget” or “wedding” cigars taste and smell like the only gas-station bought cigar that should ever be smoked: Backwoods.

Some cigars come pre-wrapped in plastic, others do not. It is your decision to either leave them in their protective plastic sleeve, or to remove them when you re-stock your humidor. I used to take them out, hoping for greater infusion qualities, until a close friend, and fellow cigar smoker pointed out, notedly, that “If you leave the cigars inside the plastic, it will do more to protect them when or if you decide to strike out for a friends house, and grab a few heading out the door.” This made perfect sense to me. I could have invested in a cigar travel case, but the bulk of cigars I smoke, I do so socially, and as such I feel they do not require any sort of over-the-top attention to safety or care outside of their cedar lined womb. Also, in my experience transporting them, a coat or shirt pocket does just fine for your local, average gathering of buddies.

“This is a kind of weird technique I sometimes use. If the cigar should get prematurely “assey” or “skunky”, blowing the settled smoke out of the cigar by means of positive pressure (not the negative pressure used to draw) might help preserve and suspend the flavor, allowing a inconsistent cigar a chance to maintain a more flavorful state. This is not a sure-thing, as you may know, some cigars can be above and beyond all repair even before you light it.”

-BTDestroyer

Make checking your humidity levels in your humidor a bi-weekly habit, more often in changing seasons or inclement weather, and adjust accordingly. I strongly suggest investing in a electronic hydrometer so you can easily tell the humidity levels in your humidor without much guesswork, unlike analog dial-type hydrometers, which seem to work “when they feel like it”. As a plus, most hydrometers I see also have a temperature gauge included in the read-out. I have a glass-top humidor so I can look into it without compromising the fragile humidity levels of a smaller, passively humidified, humidor. This is a necessary expense that I believe will prove itself very useful, and other than your humidor and the cigars themselves, is the only other expensive purchase I can think of.

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Many of the topics I hit on in this guide are “at-a-glance” and I will add more as I think of them, and further elaborate on some that I feel may need more attention to detail in other pages . I hope this guide will help ensure a smoother transition into the world of cigars for you, and the reviews and ratings section will keep you coming back for that same reason!

T.