If You Buy a Bigger Humidor, You’ll Smoke Better Cigars For Less Money
June 22nd, 2011Clients often ask us what size humidor they should order. We tell them if you buy a bigger humidor, you’ll smoke better cigars for less money. This sounds a little like salesmanship, but it’s not. It’s a simple fact. Here’s the explanation: Internet cigar dealers offer special deals. some sending out an email every day about the latest bargain smoke. Often, cigars that normally sell for $6 to $8 or more apiece, some 90+ rated, are on sale for $50 or $60 a box. You can’t take advantage of these deals if you don’t have someplace to safely store the cigars. For that you need a good quality, good sized humidor. You can’t risk damage to your inventory by keeping them in a cheap imported humidor that is subject to failure at any time, or in a converted cooler thet doesn’t adequately breathe.
And there’s another advantage. We all know that tobacco improves with age. Premium cigar tobacco is aged for years before the cigars are made, and the cigars are aged as well. Aging the cigars in your humidor for six months to a year can dramatically improve their quality. Long time cigar smokers know this well. We’ve all found old cigars buried in the bottom of the humidor and marveled at how good they were. But here’s the rub: you need the stable temperature and humidity that can only come with a good quality hardwood humidor. Otherwise, you risk making the cigar worse with rapid cycling of temperature and moisture levels.
BC
Locks and front mounted hygrometers
March 5th, 2011A lock and a front mounted hygrometer normally occupy the same space. To accomodate both, we added a second lock–a more attractive alternative, we thought, than lowering the hygrometer.
Spalted Maple
February 3rd, 2011
Here’s a recently completed humidor made of spalted maple. Spalted wood is created as decaying logs are attacked by fungi. The lumber needs to be milled after decay has started but before the wood deteriorates and becomes spongy. The decay creates difficulty with routing, sawing, and finishing, and many woodworkers avoid spalted wood. But the final result is striking, often resembling an abstract pen and ink drawing on a multi colored background. Sometimes, the spalting occurs in already figured wood, like this humidor which has some curly figure.
Sealing a Humidor–Don’t Believe Everything You Read
January 9th, 2011I was looking at the website of a reputable humidor accessories supplier and found the following statement: “The key to a properly functioning humidor is its seal.” That’s true, I thought, for Tupperware and Mason jars. But when we make a humidor, we don’t try to seal up the contents. If we wanted a seal, we’d use a gasket, like a Mason jar. And if we did that, the cigars would become musty, at best, and probably moldy. That’s the reason we store cigars in humidors and not in glass jars with screw-on lids or Tupperware containers. Cigars need a limited supply of fresh air to live a healthy life.
So the key to a properly functioning humidor is to provide for an exchange of air between the humidor and the outside world, without allowing the humidified air to escape. Cheap humidors, made primarily of softwood like pine or particle board, have a big problem fulfilling this mission. Moisture evaporates quickly through the walls of the humidor. Boveda, on it’s website, says “if your humidor was made in China, you may need an extra packet.” Several very thin sprayed coats of laquer may slow down the moisture loss a little, but won’t stop the process. So for these humidors, the “seal” around the opening is important–they lose so much mouisture through the walls that they can’t afford to lose any anyplace else.
Thick hardwood walls change the whole dynamic. Instead of being the enemy of a healthy cigar like softwood, hardwood stores moisture, lots of it, and releases it back into the humidor when it’s needed. If you cut down an oak tree and leave it your wood shed for six months, it won’t burn in your fireplace because there’s still too much moisture in the wood. Hardwood is a natural humidifier, better really, than any Credo, because of it’s low moisture transfer rate. Sometimes it takes a while to season a hardwood humidor, depending on the ambient humidity at the time it was made, because hardwood is as slow to absorb moisture as it is to release it.
A Spanish cedar lining, sometimes said to aid in humidification, really has no bearing on this process. Cedar is a poor moisture barrier. It’s soft and porous, and transmits moisture quickly. With hardwood walls, that’s what you want it to do. In a cheap humidor, the cedar sends the moisture to a bad place, a place from which it will never return. (The primary puropose of a Spanish cedar lining is to provide an environment which is aromatically appropriate and hostile to insects like the tobacco beetle).
So when we make a humidor, we don’t want and we don’t need an airtight seal between the lid and the body. Here’s what we do: We cut the Spanish cedar a little wider than the humidor walls so that, when installed, it protrudes above the body of the humidor by about 3/8″. We call this a rising baffle. Some humidors have a sinking baffle that protrudes from the top portion. This is wrong and doesn’t work–kind of like making a square wheel. The idea behind a rising baffle is that humidified air is lighter than drier air. This seems a little counterintuitive. Humid air somehow feels heavier. But the science is well settled. More humid air rises within a humidor. So with a rising baffle, the humid air has to go up and over the baffle, then down and out in order to escape. And that’s just not going to happen.
After we install the cedar, the outside dimensions of the baffle are exactly the same as the inside dimension of the lid. At first, there’s friction, and we have to really press down of the lid to get it to close. So we sand the cedar lightly to create just enough space to reduce the friction and allow the humidor to open and close easily. That’s not a seal. Just the opposite, in fact. The little bit of space between the baffle and the inside of the lid not only allows the humidor to open and close properly–it permits a limited exchange of air between the humidor and the outside. That’s what the cigars need. They don’t need to be sealed up. If any humidified air should happen to escape, there plenty more stored inside the hardwood walls.
So like I said, seals are for Tupperware, Mason jars and cheap humidors. If you have good, solid hardwood walls, you don’t need a seal, and you don’t want one. That’s why I was able to fill my humidifier on Memorial day last year, and not fill it again till mid-October. Thanks for reading this.
Bob
Strength test
January 26th, 2010To test the strength of our boxes, we ran a Jeep Cherokee over one. Here’s what happened: nothing
Curly maple and walnut
January 26th, 2010Recently completed humidor of curly maple with double walnut racing stripes top and bottom. 