10 Top Tips to maintaining your cigars properly

Cigars have a reputation for fragility, and there is no doubt that without due care, things can go awry. Cigar Keep to the rescue with a maintenance guide to help you.

  1. If you are using a humidor to store your cigars, the cedar is a companion but can also be an enemy for cigars, and so you need to treat it with water before putting cigars in. Just wipe all the wood on the inside with a damp cloth so it absorbs that moisture and won’t want to compete with your cigars as much.
  2. Despite their tropical origins, cigars want to be stored in a cool space. Basements are perfect as they will also have fairly good humidity levels.
  3. As with all technological advances, we are a lazy species and are on the lookout for that which makes our lives less arduous. For those of us who remember putting diluted water into a metal apparatus in your humidor, the Boveda pack is an iPhone to our Nokia 3210. Place around two packs per 50 cigars in your humidor and they will manage the humidity levels all by themselves. When they go hard, you just replace with a new one.
  4. If you don’t have a humidor to store your cigars, know that there are very serious collectors who use zip lock bags to store cigars, and you can do that too.
  5. Cigar maintenance is entirely subjective. The great Edward Sahakian of Davidoff of London intentionally dries his cigars as he prefers the taste, he says it is the difference between bread and toast. So perhaps experiment with both and see what suits your fancy.
  6. Rotate your cigars in whatever space they are in, like penguins in the arctic, it’s good to put those on the outside in the middle sometimes. As well as that, cigars feed off each other and so we’d recommend they are in contact in the humidor.
  7. Take pride in presentation. You never know when you may have The Proprietor for dinner who will be interested in your humidor. Arrange with the largest at the bottom so you can see everything you have for that careful selection.
  8. It is very hard for a cigar to be irretrievably dried out, so if you think you have some that are, don’t throw them away, put in a zip lock bag with a Boveda pack for three months and try again after. It is a slow-and-steady process but worth it to not have to dispose of things you love.
  9. It is recommended that you keep tabs on your cigar collection by regularly updating it on Cigar Keep. They may shrivel away into nothingness otherwise
  10. Cabinets of cigars are designed to be together, which is good as decanting them feels wrong and unjust. Keep them together and slot a Boveda pack between the cigars and the lid and that will do just fine.