10 Things Every Cigar Lover Should Know – Second part

Two hundred pairs of hands.

It is said that two hundred pairs of hands touch your cigar before it ends up in your humidor. Some even claim that the number is much higher. Suffice it to say that every time you light a cigar, it’s because many people with different skills have committed to bringing you the best hand-crafted product.

It all starts with the seeds. Crop selection and cultivation. The tobacco plant begins its development as a tiny seed planted in a pot and placed in a greenhouse. As soon as the plants reach a few centimeters in height, they are moved to the field where they will develop. When ripe, the leaves are picked by hand, stacked and dried in barns until brown. That’s a few dozen hands before the tobacco has even left the farm.

Raw tobacco is soft, unsorted and piled up – ready for fermentation. When ripe, the piles of tobacco leaves are separated and placed in dryers exposed to natural air flow. Then they are rearranged and sorted again.

After several years, the matured tobacco is sorted once again. It is rehydrated /moistened/ in special rooms with water vapor and is graded depending on its color. Here are a few dozen more hands.

We should not forget the process of rolling cigars and the people trained to do it with the correct, aged tobacco.

People who roll cigars are called TORCEDOR. They take their set of leaves to the table where they work and create the cigars according to the list of different tobaccos given to them by the master blender or brand owner, grouping and rolling them for each individual cigar. On hand! The combination of tobaccos is determined in precise proportions every time, so that the cigar smoking experience is special for you. A formula that involves more and more pairs of hands….

The finished cigars are sorted by color and sent to the aging rooms. Finally, they are put on paper rings, packed in boxes and sent to the stores. This is basically the basic technology of cigar production. Of course, there are many more quality control procedures that are mandatory at various stages of production and almost all of them are done manually. With that in mind, a hand-rolled cigar is a huge human effort, requiring the hand of an expert at every stage of its creation. To be continued.

Author: Gregory Mottola