A cigar is a living thing until you light it, and what it needs to stay alive is simple to state and hard to keep: about 69 % humidity and about 20 degrees. In Dubai, Manila or Hong Kong, the air outside gives you one of those numbers wildly wrong and the air conditioning gives you the other. Here is how to manage both.
The numbers first. Between 65 and 70 % relative humidity, a cigar draws well, burns evenly and tastes as it was rolled. Below 60 % it dries, the wrapper cracks and the smoke turns hot and thin. Above 75 % it swells, draws tight, burns crooked and, given a few weeks, grows mould. Temperature matters less than people think, as long as it stays between 16 and 21 degrees and does not swing: heat above 24 degrees is what wakes the tobacco beetle, and a car boot in Dubai in August reaches 60.
The problem with the tropics
In Manila or Hong Kong the air is at 80 % or more for most of the year, so the risk is the opposite of the one cigar books warn about. Your cigars will not dry out; they will take on water and mould. The humidor has to be a place that keeps moisture out, not in, and a humidification device is often the last thing you need. In the Gulf the situation is the reverse indoors and the same outdoors: air-conditioned rooms sit at 30 to 40 % and dry a cigar in a week, while a terrace in July is a steam bath. The humidor's job there is to hold a line between two extremes that change every time you open a door.
What actually works
Two-way humidity packs. A Boveda or similar pack at 69 % both releases and absorbs moisture, which is why it works in both climates, and it needs no water, no gel and no calibration. One pack for every twenty-five cigars, changed when it goes stiff. A humidor with a good seal: Spanish cedar lined, with a lid that closes with a slight sigh. A hygrometer you have checked once, with the salt test, because most of them read five points off out of the box. And patience: a new humidor takes two weeks to settle, and a cigar that has been dried out takes a month to come back, slowly, and never entirely.
“Sixty-nine, twenty, and a lid that shuts. Everything else is jewellery.”A boutique owner in Jumeirah · on humidors
What does not
The fridge, which is too dry and too cold and smells of food. Sealed plastic bags without a pack, which trap whatever humidity the cigar had and turn it to mould in the tropics. Sponge humidifiers filled with tap water, which grow things. Leaving the box in the car, ever. And the shop window, which is why the good boutiques keep their display cigars separate from the ones they sell.
Travel
For a week, a travel humidor with one pack, or simply our gift box of ten with its pack, closed with the elastic. For a flight, keep the cigars in the cabin: the hold is cold and dry. For a few days in a hotel, the minibar is the worst place in the room and the wardrobe is the best. And if a cigar arrives cracked, let it rest a day in the humidor before deciding; a wrapper that split from cold sometimes closes again as the leaf takes on water.
Our boxes, the cedar twenty-five and the molave ten, are described on the Robusto Maduro page. Lounges and boutiques that want a humidor for the counter will find it in the venue kit on the wholesale page.
