This has been quite a learning curve and I wonder how much importance goes into our experience with each smoke. First of all I live in Louisiana which is almost rain forest humidity levels most of the time. Temperature today is 78 with 58% humidity. Which is quite dry for us. My humidor is 70 degrees with 70% RH. Most of you don't agree with this. I plan to smoke this afternoon. My thoughts are: How is this going to play into my experience with smoking today? Am I going to have a good burn, am I going to have problems with my sticks splitting or cracking from the heat as I smoke. I don't think many of us consider this. We tend to blame the cigar, "that was a bad stick had lots of burn issues and so on". I think more because we have our sticks in a humidor at ?? temp & ??% RH and remove it to smoke into ?? temp & ??% RH and never consider how that affects our smoking experience. We are quick to call "Bad Cigar" without realizing the big change from humidor to atmosphere causes the real burn issues. I may be totally wrong here but I am thinking out loud, if you will. This thinking has been determined from multiple experiences with cracked cigars while smoking in cold weather and little humidity to hot weather with 100% humidity.
reviews, experiences and humidity
- Thread starter NOGILLS2
- Start date
What I am talking about is changes from Humidor to Atmosphere, How much does that affect the stick and it's performance when we smoke it. I have had sticks completely fall apart, because it is moved from a controlled space to a very dry atmosphere with little or no humidity plus heat from the lighter. Or from a controlled space to 100% humidity while raining and get a bad burn, not wanting to stay lit and so on.
I've not had a problem. I keep my cigars at 65rh and smoke usually with an ambient rh around 75-85%
I would think it takes a while for the humidity to affect the burn of the cigar. Keep them in your traveldor, maybe even inside a plastic bag until ready to smoke if you have a concern but I really don't think half an hour or so of exposure to ambient humidity and temps will have a noticeable affect. Once you light up, the warm smoke will help drive out any residual humidity. Just what I noticed.
The proprietor at Mayan Imports said in Vegas maybe but down here cigars are good for a week to ten days without humidification. We are a lot like the places where they roll them.
The proprietor at Mayan Imports said in Vegas maybe but down here cigars are good for a week to ten days without humidification. We are a lot like the places where they roll them.
This.
Outside humidity has never even remotely been a factor for me, even on the most humid summer day and my cigars being kept at 62% in the humi. Consider how long it takes to "dry" a cigar out from the 70-72% RH commonly found at a B&M (roughly 1% per week is a decent rule of thumb; ergo, 8 weeks = 8% drop). So to the OP @NOGILLS2 -- unless you're in a swimming pool, there's no way a sudden bump in ambient humidity is going to make your cigar so wet as to be unsmokable. I'll defer here to @Hopduro , BOTL's resident chemistry PhD, for his opinion! What say you, Brendon?More than anything, I'd be willing to bet that any cracking or splitting issues the OP is having are being caused by sticks stored at excess humidity. 70% used to be my storage number and I had terrible uneven burn issues and wrapper damage for months. Only when I dropped the RH to 65 did I notice drastic improvement. Dropping it further to 62 eliminated my problems altogether. YMMV!
Well, think about it, your cigar is at 70% rh, the surroundings are 58%, the water in the cigar evaporates causing the tobacco to shrink... boom cracked cigar, especially when heat is applied to speed up evaporation!
Sent from Webmost's phone
Sent from Webmost's phone
Just got out of the 28 bottle wino. Great smoke but god damn that was a tight fit.