Friday, April 10 2009
By Didier Houvenaghel
When discussing cigar storage, various opinions and theories are often advanced by both amateurs and professionals. These range from the most astonishing: "If you have no cigar
humidor, you can maintain your cigars into the fridge," to the most convincing and clever conceptually: "A cigar cannot be preserved in good condition more than so many years." This month, let's try to understand how we can put our cigars into optimal conditions.
The Basics
Two types of humidity are involved in cigar storage. The first and most important is the cigar's constituent humidity. This is the level of the water present in and between the cigar's internal leaves. This humidity is important to the combustion and the savor during the tasting. The optimal range of constituent humidity is generally considered to be from 11.5% to 13.5%. Outside those thresholds, the cigar may be considered too dry or too humid for tasting. Second is the cigar's environment humidity, being the level of water present into the atmosphere around the cigar. Typically this is the concentration of H2O (water) in the storage ambiance. Tending to naturally reach an equilibrium, cigars gain or lose humidity in function of their environment's content of water. Being logically interconnected, both humidity levels are therefore equally important.
In all systems, the gas exchanges between elements are linked to three parameters: humidity, temperature and pressure. This last factor is not as easy to manage as the atmospheric pressure is quite difficult to control in our humidors. Therefore only the 2 others - RH% and Temp? - are to be controlled for an optimal conservation of our cigars. To maintain a cigar in good condition, both the water exchanges between the cigar and its environment, and the influence of the RH% and Temp?, should be fully understood.
Conditions
Storing cigars, be it for long term aging or short term improvement, might require some fine tuning. On the one hand, the environment humidity should assure an optimal cigar constituent humidity for tasting and combustion. On the other hand, the focus should be on assuring a cigar constituent humidity that would optimize the year-long slow fermentation and aging processes.
Short term tasting desires
Individually, the appreciation of tastes and colors are highly personal. This subjective perception is not worth discussing, as all of us develop our own individual taste preferences. After enough experience, some aficionados favour more humid cigars while others favour cigars that are dryer. Then we all personally decide the storage conditions that best fit our cigar tastes.
Long term aging desires
You might want to age your cigars from several years up to several decades. If that is the case, then you will have to secure the stability of the storage environment. Also, the conditions should be more conservative in order to slightly slow down the fermentation process. This means storage conditions that are a little cooler and with somewhat lower humidity, too.
The "oriented" storage
In some situations, the amateur or the expert might want to modify the conservation ambiance in order to fulfill a certain objective. Here are two examples:
1) Humidity problem: Let's say you find that you have some cigars that are in an extremely dry state. You might want to put them into conditions that are not naturally optimal in order to bring them back to normality. This is common during re-humidification of old cigars for instance, but must be done slowly as not to entirely ruin the cigars.
2) Lasioderma (tobacco beetles): You discover that some of your cigars are infested with Lasioderma. First, you would immediately remove all the cigars from the humidor and isolate the infected ones. But in order to find the "source" of the problem, you want to encourage parasite hatching. Why? Because when you have a contamination you should rid it entirely. Therefore, isolate all the cigars and/or boxes individually to avoid mutual contamination, and then try to stimulate hatching by raising the temperature, which will help localize the Lasioderma. (Hopefully, the infestation is only in the cigars.) Follow-up by taking the appropriate steps to kill the larvae. Now you know that the box itself is free of any contamination, not just the cigars.
By box or by cigars?
This concept is also very personal. Technically, the cigar aging process is better with a larger amount of cigars in the humidor. In the following cases, conservation by boxes remains the best option:
1) When the aesthetic visual contact with the box is important to the amateur.
2) When some cigars are very different in blend, and could possibly modify each other's aroma and/or flavor characteristics.
3) When your humidor is too small to hold a factory box.
Suggestion and personal use
In order to determine the right cigar storage conditions, you should define the objective of your storage preference. If you're an aficionado who likes to age your cigars, you could first have a humidor to maintain cigars for the short term, and a second one dedicated especially for long term aging.
But the very best thing is to adapt the storage conditions with your personal experience and desires…that is a knowledge that takes time to develop but is quite fun to experience. Develop your own experience and you will enjoy the flavors of your cigars even more over the long term!
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Didier Houvenaghel is a Belgian agricultural engineer who spent many years in Cuba studying tropical crops, specializing in black tobacco. His extensive research and knowledge of the tobacco growing and curing process led him to create Nicarao cigars, his own brand of Nicaraguan puros, now made in partnership with Rocky Patel. Didier is also the author of the book, The Cigar: From Soil to Soul.
