Cigar Woman: Cigar Primer Part 1 – Cigar Ingredients

The Cigar Woman Cigar Primer

Our cigar primer will teach you everything you need to know about how to choose and smoke a cigar. We cover topics such as

1. The "parts" and ingredients of a cigar
2. How to select a cigar
3. How to cut, and light a cigar
4. How to store a cigar

Part 1 – Cigar Ingredients

Before choosing a cigar, you might be interested in knowing how they are made.

All hand made cigars are comprised of 3 parts:

1. The center of the cigar is filler tabacco

2. A binder leaf which holds the filler togehter

3. The outer wrapper, which is rolled around the binder leaf.

For the novice cigar smoker, it is important to be able to identify a hand made cigar from a hand rolled cigar, from a machine made cigar.

Handmade cigars use "long filler" tobacco. Long filler is a term to describes tobacco leaves which run the length of the cigar. All 3 parts of the cigar are assembled manually.

Machine-made cigars use machinery to combine scraps of tobacco into "short filler." Machine-made cigars are placed under a great deal of tension, so they use a homogenized tobacco product which is stronger and smokes differently than natural leaves.

Recently, the term "hand-rolled" has come about for a select few companies that combine machine-bunching (using long filler tobacco) with hand-rolled wrappers.

Cigar Filler

The quality of the "smoking experience" is determined by the quality and blend of the tobaccos used.

The filler is typically made up of 3 different types of leaves.

1. Ligero leaves provide power to the flavor
2. Seco leaves balance the Ligero leaves with a milder flavor
3. Volado leaves are blended into the mix ensuring an even burn

A tiny bit of gum tragacanth (sap from a gum tree) is applied to seal the wrapper. It’s a tasteless and safe form of dietary fiber keeps the cigar together until you can enjoy it! 

In our Cigar Woman Cigar Primer Part 2, we cover choosing a cigar by its color, shape, and size.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Did you enjoy this post? Please subscribe to my RSS feed.

Thanks for visiting!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:53 am and is filed under Cigars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.