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Burning Down The House: How To Light A Cigar

Like any essential, simple activity, lighting a cigar has been rendered an expensive process by modern capitalism. You might think a box of matches would do the trick, but why settle for little sticks of burning wood when you could be lighting your stogies with an S.T. Dupont Ligne 2 Versailles Collection Lighter (retail price: $1795)?

Cigar aficionados who live in windy climates – the Alps, perhaps – will want to invest in the windproof flame Exodus lighter from Xikar, at just under $60. (Or you could just, you know, get out of the wind.) Or perhaps you’d like your lighter to double as a cigar punch – after all, they say this is an age of multitasking. In that case, just $100 will suffice to purchase yourself a Colibri V2 twin V-flame lighter. Or maybe you want a lighter that says “Porsche” on it – that’ll be $99 for the Electric Piezo PDI from Porsche Design, please. Even more pretentious is the classic Dunhill lighter, which goes for anything from $450-510. For that money, it should drive your car and cut your hedges too.

For those of you who just want to get the thing lit, of course, there are many more sensible, less flashy options. The dependable Zippo lighter is always a good choice, and, of course, there are always matches – though in all seriousness, it really is better to use sulphur-free matches to spare yourself from that chemical aftertaste.

If there’s one thing that this profusion of fancy lighters attests to, it’s the trepidation with which cigar smokers approach that moment of ignition. After all, a badly-lit cigar smokes unevenly or not at all, which will in turn necessitate a second lighting. You don’t want your hard-earned tobacco going to waste. Not only that, but the way you light a cigar may affect its taste – adversely, in most cases.

The taste of a cigar is a delicate balance between many elements (filler, wrapper, binder, conditions of storage, etc) – taste can be affected by chemicals from cheap matches, or even by handling the end of the cigar with cologne-soaked hands. Especially dangerous are liquid fuel-based lighters. The lighter fluid that through the metal fuse drives the flame, in such lighters, has its own strong smell and taste – and you’d better believe that those fumes are carried into your cigar by the flame, where they remain, moving further into the cigar with each puff. (Butane lighters, on the other hand, are OK.)

Obviously, lighting a cigar calls for a certain caution. And, just as important, careful lighting can enhance the relaxed, slightly elevated, formal, ritual quality of the after-dinner smoke. Would you cut the pages of an antique, first-edition Dickens novel with a pair of K-Mark scissors? Would you marinate a premium steak in a four-dollar bottle of Ripple? Would you go to church in your bathrobe?

Torch lighters are useful when you’re braving the elements (those high winds again). Otherwise, a flint lighter or sulphur-free match is fine. Cut the end of the cigar and ignite, holding the foot of the cigar just above the flame. Turn the cigar (don’t move the flame, but the cigar). If possible, blow lightly on the burning end of the cigar to help more and more of the tobacco to ignite. Continue turning, and a glowing ring should slowly form. Be patient. (You may need to use more than one match – which is another argument for buying longer matches.) Another factor to consider is that torch lighters tend to be lower down on the price scale, with good ones ranging between $15-150 rather than the $100 and up required for flint lighters. (Most of the pricier lighters mentioned above were, of course, flint lighters.)

When the whole end of the cigar is aglow, insert the other end into your mouth. Take a long puff, so that any still-dry tobacco is caught up in the general incandescence. Don’t start puffing too quickly, which pulls the flame up through the cigar and leads to a hotter, acidic, less tasty smoke.

Follow these hints, and your cigar experience will proceed smoothly and pleasurably from ignition to countdown to liftoff. Probably. Remember, these things are handmade. If, despite your best efforts, you find that the cigar burns unevenly, do not attempt to relight; it won’t work. Smoke it the best you can and suck it up (no pun intended!). There’ll be more.

About Cigar Fox 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.

Iconic Females Who Enjoyed Cigars

Who comes to mind when you hear the word “cigar” smoker? If you’re like too many people – most of them nonsmokers – you imagine a well-dressed male, perhaps wearing a sweater vest, someone – no matter what age – who exudes a certain personal gravity.

In fact, though, many important women throughout history have bucked this stereotype. From Catherine the Great to some of today’s most popular actresses, these women wouldn’t let popular misconceptions stand between them and the rich, full taste of a cigar. Herein, learn about just a few of history’s great female cigar smokers.

Catherine the Great For 34 pivotal years, from 1762 till her death in 1796, the German-born Catherine II (born Sophie Auguste Frederica; she married into the Russian royal family in 1745) ruled Russia with an iron hand in a velvet glove. As the idea of human rights and greater political freedom blazed across Europe, Catherine maintained a correspondence with several of the most important apostles of these ideas, including Voltaire and Diderot, and she encouraged the arts and education, establishing a girls’ school based on the then-new ideas of John Locke.

Outside Russia, she was often hailed as an “enlightened despot.” But she acted ruthlessly toward those she perceived as political rivals, including Tsar Ivan VI (who was under arrest at the time of her accession and whose murder, by his jailers, she supposedly ordered) and Princess Tarakanova (seduced and captured by an aide of Catherine’s, whereupon she was taken to jail, eventually dying of tuberculosis). Worst of all, she suppressed attempts to lighten the load of Russia’s serfs, and (after the French Revolution of 1789) supported reactionary movements abroad. She left Russia – and the world – an ambiguous legacy.

She was also such a passionate devotee of cigars that, according to one story, she invented the cigar band – she didn’t want the tobacco soiling her imperial fingers.

Annie Oakley According to legend, this great American sharpshooter (1860-1926) could split a playing card by its edges and – as a bonus – perforate it with five or six more holes before it touched the ground. She was born in rural western Ohio, and by age nine she was helping to support the family by hunting and selling game, eventually paying off the mortgage on her mother’s house in this way. In 1881, at the age of 21, she beat famous traveling sharpshooter Frank Butler in a contest arranged by a local hotelier – a fateful victory that not only ensured her fame and her subsequent career as a traveling stunt shooter, but her marriage, to Butler in 1882.

The eagle-eyed five-footer became known as “Little Sure Shot” on joining the traveling Buffalo Bill Wild West Show in 1885. She continued to improve even after retiring from the circuit, setting records even after a 1922 auto accident seriously compromised her health. She died in 1926, and was followed 20 days later by Butler – he missed her so badly that she stopped eating. On her death it was discovered that she’d spent her entire fortune on her family and on charities.

Ironically, this great (if nonviolent) gunslinger was born a Quaker – the same pacifist sect that also gave us, with even greater irony, Richard Nixon.

Gertrude Stein If anyone was ever a “writer’s writer,” that writer was Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Though her gristly, complicated prose, with its constant repetitions and frequently nonsensical effects, has defeated even extremely intelligent readers, her ferocious originality made her an acknowledged influence on nearly every writer of the ’20s who mattered. Sherwood Anderson called her works “a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words.”

Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles and Richard Wright were all strongly influenced by her, and she helped as well to pave the way for the popular acceptance of Cubism, the painting style which she tried to translate into language. More recently, Stein has become an icon among gay and lesbian writers and scholars, who have pointed to Q.E.D. (1903) as one of the earliest coming-out stories in the English language. Both her eccentricity and her passionate devotion to language are fully on display in her famous outburst against the comma: “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only now I do not pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading.”

Though she worked behind the scenes, influencing writers and artists destined to a popular acceptance she would never enjoy, it’s hard to imagine the twentieth century without Stein, a longtime cigar lover. Her student Sherwood Anderson put it best: “I do think she had an important thing to do, not for the public, but for the artist who happens to work with words as his material.”

Marlene Dietrich Bringing things full circle, the great German-born actress and singer Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992), who played Catherine the Great in the classic 1934 drama The Scarlet Empress, was also a cigar smoker. After her great success in the 1930 Josef Von Sternberg film The Blue Angel, she emigrated to the US and conquered the young American film industry, working with Von Sternberg to refine her image as a femme fatale. But she also provided an example to generations of actresses by continually reinventing herself.

After the bossy and difficult Von Sternberg lost his job at Paramount Studios, she soldiered on, proving herself a great comic actress in 1939’s Destry Rides Again and continuing to work in important films throughout the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, Touch of Evil (1958), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and Witness for the Prosecution (1957) among them. She also spoke out against Nazi anti-Semitism early and often, and won the Medal of Freedom for her work raising morale during World War II.

About Cigar Fox 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.

Log Cabins And Lincoln Rear Ends: The Strange World Of Collectible Cigar Boxes

When cigar giant CAO announced a special, officially-licensed cigar commemorating the long-running TV show The Sopranos, the combination seemed to make sense. What’s less surprising than a cigar company saluting a universally-hailed TV show, whose “hero,” Tony Soprano, was so often seen chomping the end of a premium cigar?

But some buyers were a little disconcerted when the limited-edition cigar came packaged in a box that looked like the back end of Tony Soprano’s car.

However, the crazy CAO Sopranos box actually continues an honorable tradition: the novelty cigar box. 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.

For starters, there was the Immense Cigar box – a giant, two-foot-long cigar-shaped wood box holding within it 100 small cigars. (Children of the eighties, on reading about this bit of memorabilia, may remember those giant Darth Vader heads in which you could pack your Star Wars figures.) Made by the four-person Louis Simons cigar factory of New York City in 1878, this wonderfully literal-minded package (a cigar containing, well, cigars) was among the first to benefit from the Postal Service’s rule relaxation.

Then there’s 1877’s Piper Heidsieck champagne-bottle packages. They were hand-turned on a lathe, and only 25 were made; each is a masterpiece of American craftsmanship. They could be unscrewed at the middle, with the cigars standing loosely up from the bottom of the bottle.

And you can’t serve champagne without crackers and cheese, right? Cheese It cigars (not the most promising brand name ever) made a round cheesebox-shaped cigar package for its five-cent smokes during the year 1880. Now exceptionally rare, these elaborate cigar packages also include (on the inside of the top of the box) an illustration from a famous Central Park race walk held in 1878, with the nation’s top race walkers depicted therein (one of them being menaced by a wheels of cheese!). This box is so sublimely silly and complex that it just barely escapes the otherwise-inevitable designation “cheesy.”

And then, in a sort of act of meta-commentary, there was Foster, Hilson and Company’s mailbox-shaped cigar box. Exploiting the new openness in postal laws, this company released mailboxes in the shape of the receptacle into which mail-order cigars were to go. Released in 1881, this novelty item (from the then-giant New York firm) must have been hard to stack, given that curved top.

Then there are the practical boxes: for example, a box with its own thermometer and calendar. Quite possibly a give-away by a bank company (the three existing Frank Pchaski cigar boxes that match this calendar-and-thermometer profile all have different year calendars on them), these late-1880s boxes allowed you to have a smoke and, uh – tell the temperature at the same time. And know what date it was. Perhaps “practical” is in the eye of the beholder.

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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Badger's Cigar Den: Schuylerville's New Destination Saratoga.com For those who wish to leave the house for an hour, enjoy a premium hand-rolled cigar and escape life, look no further than Broad Street in Schuylerville. …

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Rick Taylor may be able to go head to head against House Republicans, but taking on the defending World Series champs is another matter. Taylor, a Democratic state representative from Montgomery County, came out on the short end Wednesday night in read more

NICOSIA: Police have found a cache of explosives hidden in cigar tubes at the central prisons. They moved in after receiving a tip off and found the explosives concealed in a toilet near the kitchens It is not known how they got inside the facility read more

It’s A Small World: Tobaccos From Around The Globe

Most nonsmokers think of tobacco plants as interchangeable – if you’ve smoked one, you’ve smoked ‘em all. But as anyone knows who has ever compared the taste of a premium cigar to a cheap one – or who has visited the Middle East, where an undreamt-of range of sweetly intense tobacco smells assault the tourist’s nostril – nothing could be further from the truth. Tobacco plants vary as widely – and as consequentially – as any other plant. Here is a rough guide to a few of these differences – and the difference they make to smokers.

Going alphabetically, we begin with Aromatic Fire-Cured tobacco, grown in the western portions of Tennessee and Kentucky as well as in Virginia. Rich and slightly flowery, you’ll find it used in snuff, cigarettes and as the less dominant partner in blends made for pipe smokers. On the other side of the world, there’s a variant, another kind of fire-cured tobacco: strong-flavored Latakia, grown in Cyprus and Syria for use in Balkan and English pipe tobacco blends.

Then there’s Brightleaf tobacco, which originated in North Carolina and, hence, is nicknamed “Virginia tobacco.” (Well, whatever.) Developed in 1839, in response to smokers’ demands for a milder tobacco than the dark fire-cured leaves commonly grown in the antebellum South, this tobacco owes its existence to a combination of industry and happenstance.

Farmers in nearby Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as farther-away Ohio, had been trying since the early part of the century to develop a lighter leaf, trying different ways of curing the plants. Abisha Slade of North Carolina, noticing that sandy soil tended to yield weaker plants, tried the expedient of planting a gold-leaf plant in a field of seemingly-infertile sandy soil belonging to him. A clever idea, but all might still have been lost had Slade’s slave, Stephen, not used charcoal to restart a curing fire that had gone out. The sudden heat turned the leaves yellow. Slade, noticing this, seized on it and made of it a method: grow plants in poor soils and then heat-cure them with charcoal (rather than fire-curing them with, well, fire).

In any case, Slade’s discovery – or Stephen’s discovery – had immediate economic implications. Not only did American smokers now have the less acrid tobacco they’d been looking for, but Virginia farmers had something for which they’d hardly dared hope – an economic use for the previously infertile Appalachian piedmont.

Farmers stuck with otherwise-useless lands suddenly had a cash crop – and the Piedmont counties came to dominate US tobacco production. The Civil War only increased the popularity of Brightleaf tobacco, as Confederate soldiers passing through the railway hub of Danville, VA, acquired a taste for the popular local variety, and brought that taste with the to the front.

Trading it among each other – and, during breaks in battle, with Union soldiers – these young men served as Brightleaf’s unappointed press agents. The Civil War created a national market for the crop and ensured that Virginia’s Caswell and Pittsylvania Counties were the only counties in the South to find themselves richer after the war than before it.

White Burley tobacco, meanwhile, furnishes a true example of evolution in action. At the tail-end of the Civil War, an Ohio farmer, George Webb, finds that a few of his seedlings look sick and whitish; in the field, they grow to normal size but remain light-colored. He put them on sale at a Cincinnati market – not as a smokable tobacco but as a novelty plant. But by the following year he’d already decided that the air-cured, mild-tasting leaf was worth a risk, and planted ten acres of seedlings from that first generation of mild white plant. With time, the new variety – White Burley, produced seemingly by chance genetic mutation and encouraged in its development by cultivation – became the primary ingredient in chewing tobacco as well as in American pipe and cigarette tobacco. Meanwhile, Red Burley, popular in the mid-nineteenth century, sank into obscurity and eventual extinction; nowadays White Burley is generally just Burley.

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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Hernando County business digest – Tampabay.com

Tampabay.com

Hernando County business digest Tampabay.com For more than 100 years, cigars have been a tradition for the Serafin family, beginning with Arnold's great-grandfather, … and more »

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Badger’s Cigar Den: Schuylerville’s New Destination – Saratoga.com

Badger's Cigar Den: Schuylerville's New Destination Saratoga.com For those who wish to leave the house for an hour, enjoy a premium hand-rolled cigar and escape life, look no further than Broad Street in Schuylerville. …

Source: news.google.com

Boudreaux’s opens on Main – Louisville Courier-Journal

Boudreaux's opens on Main Louisville Courier-Journal “Having cuisine and cigars that complement each other and being able to smoke a cigar in public while eating dinner is an attraction for most smokers,” said …

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