Blog & Cigar News | Mardo Cigars

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Mondays with Mardos. I have this question asked to me again and again and again. How long do cigars last in a humidor? But before I get going, I do need you to click on the subscribe button. Click on the bell to be notified every single week on new episodes on Mondays with Mardos. I do get this question a lot. It can be annoying, but however, it is a good question no doubt. Well, if you get a cigar and you have a drawer like this in your desk and you just throw it in there, within about two to three weeks that cigar is gone, if not any shorter than that, depending on how of a dry environment you live in. If you live in a desert in Las Vegas or Palm Springs, that cigar is going to dry out pretty darn quick.

So you definitely want them in a humidor. If it's a wood humidor, you want it to be 72% humidity. If it's a [inaudible 00:00:52] humidor, you want it at 69%. Boveda does a very good job on supplying you the specific relative humid packets. But how long will it last in a humidor? A cigar will last a very long time. It can last in a humidor for years. But how long do you want to keep it in there is a different question, right? So aging cigars is not necessarily crucial, but it's advantageous because it's going to taste a lot better. Why is that? Well, tobacco has had ammonia as a byproduct, and that's why whenever blenders or cigar manufacturers buy tobaccos, even if it's been aged, they definitely want to open up the bales of tobacco and let it get some air in there, definitely humid air. Being in Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, it's a very tropical environment. So it's not a big deficit that they need to overcome introducing humidity, but they want to air out to make sure that there's not a lot of ammonia.

And when you introduce different tobaccos within a cigar, you're cross blending two different species of tobaccos, and therefore, they need to marry. And this is going to take time. Now, even though ammonia is still a byproduct, a cigar needs to sit, it needs to age, it needs to marry. As it's doing this, it's going to emit some ammonia out of the foot of the cigar. The cap of the cigar is the top of the cigar that's capped, and the foot that's going to be open. And when you have it inside a humidor, even though it is being exposed to air because the foot is open, the humidity is going to preserve the cigar oils on the tobacco, but it's going to emit the ammonia. And that's what you want to get out. But it takes a while for that whole entire cigar to age, right? So that's why sometimes it takes years for you to be able to age a cigar to the perfection that you want it to be.

But anything over three to five years is exaggerating it. Eventually, those oils are going to settle. They are going to dissipate, unfortunately. They are going to rub off on the cellophane of your cigar. That's why you see a lot of cigars that are aged, the cellophane is very yellow. Those are oils. So you don't want to overage a cigar. I say three to five years at the most is pretty good. A lot of times you get cigars that are already good the way they are, they don't have a lot of ammonia in them. For instance, for us, we store cigars anywhere between 40 to 60 days before we package them. For me, those cigars are ready to smoke.

If I age it a little bit more, it'll be good. However, I will not know that unless I smoke the cigar. And if it tastes sour, I can kind of tell it has a little bit of ammonia still in the cigar. That's when I'm going to let it age. But to answer your question, how long do cigars last in a humidor? Four years. How long do you want to keep them? Not that long, not decades. Three to five years at the most, and then go smoke it. Anyways, let me know in the comments if you agree with me or disagree with me, whatever. Just kidding. Anyways, I'll see you guys next week. Remember to follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook, and tell your friends subscribe to our YouTube channel. See you. Bye.