Cigar accessories are good, cigar lighters are necessary. Why, you might ask? That is an excellent question, and lets answer that for you right now.
After you have taken your cigar out of that nice humidor that you store all of your cigars in, and after you clip the end of your cigar with a good quality cigar cutter, you need some way to light it up. You have many choices.
You could light up your cigar with a match, but cigars don't light up like cigarettes. With larger ring gauges it might take a couple of minutes to light your cigar. And matches have a sulphur smell when they are struck. That smell could very will be drawn into your cigar thereby changing the taste. Now there are cigar matches that are longer that can be used as, once lit, they can be allowed to burn off the sulphur to eliminate the smell.
You can also use a regular old lighter that you can pick up just about any where. But those types of lighters use lighter fluid that can also impart a taste on your cigar.
Finally, you can use a butane lighter. Butane ignites and burns without a smell so it will not impart an off flavor to your cigar. Consequently, a butane cigar lighter is the one most favored to light up with.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Cigar Accessories - A Humidor is Worth its Weight in Cigars
Cigar humidors go with cigars like salt and pepper. Each one dependant on the the other, and each one enhancing the other.
Cigars need to be kept at a constant humidity of 70% to maintain their taste and their smokability. Humidors are what does that for you. If you smoke cigars, one of the cigar accessories you must have it a humidor.
Humidors come with a couple of humidification styles. Passive, or active. Sounds simple, doesn't it? It really is, as long as you take this seriously. The passive style of humidor has a reservoir where you add distilled water. Once you fill the reservoir, you put it back in your humidor, close the lid and go away. The work comes as you need to check your humidity, and how moist the reservoir is weekly. If you don't check it and it dries out, so do your cigars. And no one wants that.
The active style of humidor is usually electric. You fill a tank with distilled water, plug it in and walk away. You still need to check your water level regularly, but this style of humidor usually has a warning device to let you know when your water level is getting too low.
Once you decide which style is best your you, then you have to look at how you want your humidor to look. And there are hundreds of different sizes, colors, and models out there for you to choose from. Some humidors are built to be pieces of furniture such as coffee tables, and armoires. You can even buy a humidor from any of the cigar dealers on line that come with cigars already in them. And who doesn't like a deal like that?
Cigars need to be kept at a constant humidity of 70% to maintain their taste and their smokability. Humidors are what does that for you. If you smoke cigars, one of the cigar accessories you must have it a humidor.
Humidors come with a couple of humidification styles. Passive, or active. Sounds simple, doesn't it? It really is, as long as you take this seriously. The passive style of humidor has a reservoir where you add distilled water. Once you fill the reservoir, you put it back in your humidor, close the lid and go away. The work comes as you need to check your humidity, and how moist the reservoir is weekly. If you don't check it and it dries out, so do your cigars. And no one wants that.
The active style of humidor is usually electric. You fill a tank with distilled water, plug it in and walk away. You still need to check your water level regularly, but this style of humidor usually has a warning device to let you know when your water level is getting too low.
Once you decide which style is best your you, then you have to look at how you want your humidor to look. And there are hundreds of different sizes, colors, and models out there for you to choose from. Some humidors are built to be pieces of furniture such as coffee tables, and armoires. You can even buy a humidor from any of the cigar dealers on line that come with cigars already in them. And who doesn't like a deal like that?
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Cigar Accessories You Must Have
Accessories, accessories. Every hobby has them, and cigar smoking is no exception to that rule. And to be fair, to fully enjoy your cigar smoking experience, having the proper cigar accessories can help enhance that experience.
How, you might ask? Well consider not having the correct cigar cutter. On the old spaghetti westerns you saw Clint Eastwood biting off the cap of his cigar before he lit up. Must not have had the right cigar accessories, or else he was smoking a dime-store cigar. Never bit the cap off of a cigar. You could make the wrapper unravel, you could damage the binder, or filler tobacco, and besides, that just isn't the way to treat an expensive cigar. The first cigar accessory that you need to purchase is a cigar cutter. And there are many to choose from.
The first kind of cutter is the single blade guillotine.
This cutter is pretty inexpensive and does the job well. Of course you can get as fancy with cigar accessories as you want to, and spend crazy amounts of money. But the way you pick your cigar accessories is up to you.
In the same vein as the single blade cutter, is the double blade and cigar scissors. They all make the same kind of cuts and again, you can spend your money on accessories, your you can spend your money on cigars. The choice is completely up to you. Here are examples of the double blade, and the scissor cutters:
The last cutter that I am going to talk about is the wedge cutter. This is my personal favorite as it just looks so freaking cool. I don't own one, but my tobacconist does and I make sure that when I go there to pick up my latest batch of cigars to get the one I am going to be smoking on the way home cut by his wedge cutter.
But if all fails, and you haven't gotten out to start purchasing your cigar accessories, you can always just punch a hole in the cap of your cigar prior to lighting it up. This isn't the best way because tar could collect around the hole and change the taste of your cigar, but it does beat chewing the cap off.
So, enough about cutters. I will be back later this week to talk some more about cigar accessories that you just have to have.
L8R
How, you might ask? Well consider not having the correct cigar cutter. On the old spaghetti westerns you saw Clint Eastwood biting off the cap of his cigar before he lit up. Must not have had the right cigar accessories, or else he was smoking a dime-store cigar. Never bit the cap off of a cigar. You could make the wrapper unravel, you could damage the binder, or filler tobacco, and besides, that just isn't the way to treat an expensive cigar. The first cigar accessory that you need to purchase is a cigar cutter. And there are many to choose from.
The first kind of cutter is the single blade guillotine.
This cutter is pretty inexpensive and does the job well. Of course you can get as fancy with cigar accessories as you want to, and spend crazy amounts of money. But the way you pick your cigar accessories is up to you.
In the same vein as the single blade cutter, is the double blade and cigar scissors. They all make the same kind of cuts and again, you can spend your money on accessories, your you can spend your money on cigars. The choice is completely up to you. Here are examples of the double blade, and the scissor cutters:
The last cutter that I am going to talk about is the wedge cutter. This is my personal favorite as it just looks so freaking cool. I don't own one, but my tobacconist does and I make sure that when I go there to pick up my latest batch of cigars to get the one I am going to be smoking on the way home cut by his wedge cutter.
But if all fails, and you haven't gotten out to start purchasing your cigar accessories, you can always just punch a hole in the cap of your cigar prior to lighting it up. This isn't the best way because tar could collect around the hole and change the taste of your cigar, but it does beat chewing the cap off.
So, enough about cutters. I will be back later this week to talk some more about cigar accessories that you just have to have.
L8R
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