Remove the barriers from tobacco cessation - Atlanta Journal Constitution
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Remove the barriers from tobacco cessation
Atlanta Journal Constitution, USA - The reason for my question revolves around Georgia’s opportunity to provide tobacco cessation benefits to state employees, a necessary health service … |
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The ABCs of Cigar Humidors
Casual cigar owners often ask themselves: is a humidor really necessary? The answer is: only if you care about the quality and taste of your cigars.
After all, for some smokers, the after-dinner cigar is more symbolic than anything - a conspicuous display, perhaps, of taste and leisure, or a social or familial ritual. If, however, you smoke for taste - which is the best reason to smoke - you should probably invest in a humidor: a specially-constructed box designed to maintain your cigars in near-70% humidity and at a proper temperature when they’re not being smoked.
To understand why humidors are so important, remember what a cigar essentially is. It’s a set of rolled-up tobacco leaves that have been cut, dried, cured, and fermented, then maintained at a very slight but essential level of moisture. If the cigar dries out completely - as can happen in open air, at the wrong temperature, or in low humidity - it loses its taste. If it’s kept in an airtight environment, on the other hand, the necessary low level of moisture will, over time, cause mold. A cigar requires a very special set of conditions in order to maintain optimum taste.
The humidity in which cigars are stored is important because of the specific conditions in which most tobacco is grown. The natural climate for most such areas is in the neighborhood of 70% relative humidity; the tobacco plant has evolved for such a climate. Thus, humidity control is the sine qua non of a humidor - without that, it’s not a humidor but a box with cigars in it. Humidors are able to maintain a relatively consistent humidity level partly because of the relatively porous wood used to line them (Spanish cedar and Honduran mahogany are popular choices for this reason).
Most humidors also, of course, have some sort of device that maintains moisture levels; some use hygrometers, which indicate interior humidity. (Digital hygrometers tend to be more accurate, though they lack the old-fashioned appeal of dial hygrometers.)
When packing your humidor, make sure you leave some room between the cigars to allow air to circulate between them. (Again, you want to avoid an airtight fit, which would promote mold. On the other hand, too much empty space will allow that all-important humidity level to drop. Check on your cigars frequently, at least once a week, to ensure that nothing needs to be adjusted). The cigars should, at best, exude a small amount of oil when stored; this is a sign that the humidor is working. Slight amounts of water can be added if cigars start to dry out.
If your cigars suffer an attack of tobacco beetles - a species of beetle that preys on tobacco and can sometimes bore through a humidor - you’ve probably been keeping the temperature in the box a touch too high (tobacco beetles flourish at temperatures over 75 degrees.) Remove the affected cigars and put them in your freezer for 48 hours, then move them to your refrigerator for another day, following which they should be safely returnable to the humidor.
Spanish-cedar humidors are a popular choice. This wood, as mentioned above, holds moisture well, maintaining humidity, and it holds an aroma many consumers find pleasant and complementary to that of the cigars themselves. It’s also slightly favored for keeping tobacco beetles out, and it doesn’t warp in high humidity.
When you buy your humidor, “season” it by applying a moist cloth to the interior wood and then leaving a small, closed container of water inside the humidor for 12 hours. If the humidor “drinks up” most of the water, leaving the container near-empty after 12 hours, repeat the process for another 24 hours. Once the water stops evaporating, the humidor is ready for your cigars!
Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.
John Middleton Co. joined other cigar companies in asking a Maryland circuit court to overturn a recently enacted Prince George’s law that bans the sale of single cigars. In its filing, the companies are asking the court to enjoin enforcement of read more
The 50th Anniversary Cuban Revolution celebration is in a word, LAUGHABLE! For fifty years the communists on the Island and their fellow travelers in the U.S. media, education and Hollywood have applauded Castro for the will and tenacity to stand up read more
Maybe, in times of economic uncertainty, one needs only to look back in history to come to grips with how innovation inevitably changes the business landscape. The fact of the matter is that any business - newspapers being one in their own headlines read more
The following is a proposed screenplay for a fantasy flick that might open locally on Halloween. It would open with Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and a friend kicking back on his yacht, cruising in the gentle winds of the Mediterranean Sea. “What read more
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Despite search, Cotuit man still missing
Cape Cod Times, MA - The couple left the dealership in separate cars, and Robert planned to go enjoy a cigar and a drive around town – just as he did each day, Virginia said. … Man, 80, Reported Missing Cape Cod man Robert Ouellette missing |
The Materials and Construction of a Premium Cigar
Cigars can come in any shape or size - it’s the ingredients, and the way those ingredients are handled, that makes them good or bad.
Almost all cigars (except extremely thin models) are made up of three components: the filler, the tobacco at the center which is the most important ingredient; the binder, an elastic leaf that holds the filler in the center; and the outer wrapper, which contains and holds together the binder.
Perhaps the most important difference among cigars is the difference among fillers. Handmade cigars, considered the highest-quality kind, use entire tobacco leaves; this is called a “long filler.” Machine-made cigars will combine scraps of various tobacco leaves into a homogenized tobacco product called “short filler,” which can be rolled quickly into many cigars, with a corresponding loss of individual tastes and textures. Cigar aficiandos generally prefer long-filler tobacco. However, long-filler cigars can still vary in terms of the quality of tobacco used and the blend among different kinds of tobacco leaves.
Most fillers are made up of a blend of powerful ligero leaves (from the upper part of the plant, where they received the most sunlight), which are folded into the middle of the filler to ensure a long burn; milder-flavored seco leaves (from the middle of the plant); and faint-flavored, fast-burning volado leaves (from the bottom). These leaves, and the proportions in which they’re mixed, determine the quality of the smoking experience.
Tobacco leaves, to be rendered smokable, go through two processes known as curing and fermentation, the combined result of which is to reduce the sugar and water content of the leaf without incurring rotting. “Curing” takes 25-45 days and helps to determine the color of the leaf. During fermentation, the leaf is assisted in, essentially, dying as gracefully as possible, so that it becomes ready to smoke without disintegrating (and thus losing flavor).
This controlled death of the leaf, if done right, brings out its essential flavor and aroma. After this dual aging process, the leaves are sorted - the best are used for filler, the rest for wrappers. Wrappers, however, influence the cigar’s final flavor greatly as well, and their color will be used to describe the cigar in general.
Their colors run along a scale from light-greenish double claro (very light) to tan claro wrappers to natural (light brown), Colorado claro (slightly darker brown), Colorado (reddish-brown), Colorado Maduro (dark brown), maduro (dark brown) and oscuro (blackish). Color, for cigars, generally means the opposite of what it would mean for beer: lighter cigars tend to taste dry, while darker wrappers lend a sweet tinge to any cigar.
Hand-rollers then use a crescent-shaped knife, the chaveta, to roll the filler and wrapper together, being careful to ensure that the leaves remain slightly moist at all times, then store the freshly-rolled cigars in wooden forms, which give them that distinctive curved shape as they dry.
The ends are cut down to uniform size. At this point, the cigar is essentially complete; now its real journey begins, as the manufacturer ages it to taste (cigars can keep for decades if left undisturbed at close to seventy degrees farenheit and 70% relative humidity).
When the cigar is finally sold, the buyer is well-advised to keep it in a wooden box known as a humidor until it’s ready to be smoked; these specially-designed boxes (which are often extremely visually attractive as well) help to prevent cigars from drying out.
Cigar manufacture is a laborious process requiring constant vigilance. For many years, for that reason, handmade cigar factories would employ a lector (reader) to keep the rollers alert and entertained by reading books to them. Audio books have partly eliminated this phenomenon, but some factories still use a lector - perhaps the best symbol of the constant alertness necessary to produce world-class cigars.
Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.
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Commentary: Put this in your pipe and smoke it
San Jose Mercury News, USA - Pipes and cigars are less common, certainly less common than they were in the 19th You might think tobacco is a relatively new addictive substance, … Flaming Out Why fine smokers?? New Electronic Cigarette Franchises Prosper Despite the Economic … |
• La Casa De La Habana cigar store features private club - MLive.com
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• La Casa De La Habana cigar store features private club
MLive.com, MI - Not only does the new La Casa De La Habana sell some of the most exclusive cigars you can find around here, but it boasts a private cigar club for high … |
Source: news.google.com
Life after Fidel Castro's revolution: a long fall from red dawn to … - Times Online
 Times Online |
Life after Fidel Castro's revolution: a long fall from red dawn to …
Times Online, UK - Inside a large room, sitting in rows behind wooden worktops, rolling cigars by hand - political posters on the wall and Seventies pop music on the radio … |
Source: news.google.com
An Interview with CAO's Tim Ozgener - Cigar Aficionado
 Cigar Aficionado |
An Interview with CAO's Tim Ozgener
Cigar Aficionado - Q: How did CAO evolve from a company making pipes to a company that's best known for its cigars? A: When you're going to the trade show, it's basically … |
Source: news.google.com
John Middleton Sues to Overturn Single-Sale Ban - WELT ONLINE
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John Middleton Sues to Overturn Single-Sale Ban
WELT ONLINE, Germany - John Middleton Co. joined other cigar companies in asking a Maryland circuit court to overturn a recently enacted Prince George’s law that bans the sale of … |
Source: news.google.com
Famous Modern Male Icons Who Enjoy Cigars
After years of decline, cigar smoking abruptly returned to popularity in America in the 1990s, with cigar bars and shops springing up even in smaller towns and cities. Some of America’s great male icons of sports and entertainment were quick to pick up the habit, while others had been closet cigar smokers for years.
Jack Nicholson The three-time Oscar-winning star (1936-) of such films as Easy Rider (1969), Chinatown (1974), The Shining (1980) and Batman (1989) was an avid cigarette smoker in the early 1990s, when he began playing golf. But he found himself chain-smoking to a dangerous extent during intense rounds - up to half a pack per round, reportedly - and so he switched to cigars after the fifth hole. (Though no form of nicotine is “safe,” cigars are associated with far less risk of cancer than are cigarettes.) His favorite brand is Montecristo. He has since appeared on many magazine covers with his now-trademark stogie.
Michael Jordan Often cited as the greatest basketball player of all time, Jordan (1963-) is also a fan of Montecristos, which he was known to smoke on the team bus. Teammates might have wanted to complain, but, as fellow Chicago Bull John Salley once said, “We were just apostles. Jesus was smoking, that’s all there is to it. What are you going to say?”
Jordan apparently keeps his cigar smoking under control, given that he remains, even in retirement, a formidably in-shape athlete. The former University of North Carolina star joined the Bulls in 1984, and transformed basketball with his near-superhuman leaping ability; besides his plethora of MVP awards, Olympic gold medals, and more broken records than you’d find on Dick Clark’s basement floor after a drunken rage, he also remains one of the few athletes to maintain a double career with his mid-90s run as a baseball minor leaguer (inspired by his late father’s oft-expressed desire to see his son play professional baseball). Since his third and last retirement in 2003 (from the Washington Wizards), Jordan has continued playing golf in celebrity tournaments; he also owns a motorcycle-racing team.
Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather director (1939-) learned how to smoke cigars from legendary ex-Warner Brothers head Jack Warner, who hired Coppola straight out of film school to helm the music Finian’s Rainbow (1968). Coppola also, eventually, inherited a gold-and-silver cigar cutter from Warner. Their relationship is somewhat ironic, given that it was Coppola, with his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who helped transform Hollywood during the 1970s, making it (temporarily) more receptive to visionary independent films, such as Coppola’s own The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), and his friend George Lucas’s THX-1138 (1970) and American Graffiti (1973), both of which Coppola produced. Coppola also likes a little wine with his cigar habit (presumably not at the same time): he owns a California winery.
John Grisham An ex-lawyer and the biggest-selling novelist of the 1990s, Grisham (1955-) smokes a nice, moderate four cigars a week. Though he’s best known for his hugely popular legal thrillers - such as The Firm (1991) and A Time To Kill (1988) - Grisham’s humanitarian and charitable work is perhaps his most important legacy.
This includes his missionary and relief work in Brazil, as well as his service on the board of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that uses DNA testing to exonerate wrongfully convicted men and women. (This work may have inspired his 2006 bestseller, The Innocent Man, a nonfiction account of the railroading of two innocent men for the murder of a cocktail waitress.) Grisham is also notable for his support of talented writers less commercially successful than himself, endowing large scholarships to the creative-writing program at University of Mississippi and helping to found the high-quality literary magazine Oxford American.
Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.
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Felipe Gregorio Parts Ways With Miami Cigar
Cigar Aficionado - By David Savona Felipe Gregorio cigars are no longer being distributed by Miami Cigar & Co. Philip Wynne, owner of the small Dominican cigar brand, … |
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Quick Smoke: Romeo y Julieta Short Churchill (Cuban)
Stogie Guys Online Cigar Magazine, VA - Each Saturday and Sunday we’ll post a Quick Smoke: not quite a full review, just our brief take on a single cigar. I recently had occasion to light up this … |
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Businesses and Smoker Challenge Cigar Law in Court
Washington Post, United States - A cigar wholesaler, several retailers and a cigar enthusiast have filed suit against Prince George's County, arguing that the county overstepped its legal … |
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The Eurozone Stimulus That Never Was
Financial Times, UK - A trick cigar looks like a cigar. It feels like a cigar. But when you try to smoke it, nothing happens. In the case of the stimulus, the €200bn exists on … |
Novelty Cigar Boxes: The Second Wave
>From mug-shaped cigar boxes to gameboard boxes, the cigar makers of the world have shown great creativity in packaging their wares, and no period was more fertile for the cigar-box collector as that from 1878 to the early twentieth century. (All info here courtesy of the National Cigar Museum.)
The novelty cigar box began with a Federal decision in 1878, when postal codes were changed to allow packages of cigars (a heavily-regulated good, in the post-Civil War economy) to be mailed in any shape or size, as long as you could still put a stamp on ‘em. This legislative loosening just happened to come along at a moment when new tobaccos were being developed and demand, stimulated by a generation of Union soldiers who’d had to pass through tobacco country and acquired the smoking habit, was rising.
New customers, new tobaccos, new products - companies were willing to try anything to distinguish themselves from the competition, and, not incidentally, to tempt smokers into buying not an individual cigar but the entire box. And so a sort of golden age resulted: the late-nineteenth century saw some of the goofiest, cleverest, and most memorable product design lavished on cigars.
And then, things changed. Novelty packaging died out for a while during the early part of the twentieth century, only to see its fortunes change again during the Great Depression - a time, strangely enough, when many Americans could not afford entire boxes of cigars, and when the premium-cigar industry experienced harshly competitive conditions thanks to the emergence of machined-rolled cigars and cigarettes.
Novelty cigar boxes made a comeback, fueled by cigar makers’ hopes to revive by-the-box sales. Boxes from this period are often “practical,” designed for household use even after their packaging function is served, and - in a much more radical departure from previous cigar marketing efforts - they were designed to appeal to the wives or girlfriends of the men who smoked the cigars.
Padlocked-box designs enjoyed considerable popularity. Well-made enough, in many cases, to seem attractive and solid even today (when they turn up at auction), these were often made of fine woods such as red cedar; the Hudson Treasure Chest, for example, has copper trim and was originally issued with a key for its padlock. Art deco boxes were a popular choice as well.
>From the Netherlands, there came cigar boxes shaped like wooden shoes - the Karel I 10-count cigar box which was sold as a souvenir to passengers visiting Holland by boat during the decade. The shoe also contained a deck of cards. From another Dutch company came the Kaveewee truck - a little red delivery van, with a stogie-chomping driver painted on the sides and front, hollow on top and containing up to 100 cigars.
Finally, there were radio-shaped cigar boxes given away by Emerson, the electronics companies, to purchasers of new radios and televisions. Packed with twenty-five cigars, these boxes were built to resemble those waved-top, stolid little brown radios that sat in so many American living rooms broadcasting the adventures of Dick Tracy (or, more importantly, the first reports from the Blitz of London by Edward R. Murrow).
Book-shaped cigar boxes date back to the 19th century: even before the 1878 law change that encouraged a flood of novelty boxes, book-shaped boxes weren’t hard to find; their shape was close enough to standard postal boxes as not to run afoul of the more stringent pre-1878 law. But this tradition continued into the second golden age of novelty packaging; especially notable is a 1936 box with a red “spine,” reading “Democratic National Convention 1936.” On the other end of the commercial scale from this political giveaway item, consider the once-ubiquitous red-cedar boxes embossed with the words “The Sweetest Story Ever Told.” (To which I’m tempted to reply, “Well, that depends on the kind of cigar inside.”) Another favorite front motto: “Friendly Thoughts” (written in mock-Gothic, hymnbook-cover lettering).
Cigar Fox provides the finest cigars that include brands like Cohiba, Montecristo, Gurkha, Macanudo, Rocky Patel, Romeo, Drew Estate, and many more. Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters. For more information, please visit www.cigarfox.com.