How to Properly Cut a Hand Rolled Cigar

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Matthew Driggers, and we're here in Cigar Castle in Tampa, FL. And on behalf of Expert Village, this is how to hand roll cigars, smoking tips, and techniques. The next thing I want to talk about is actually cutting the cigars. Now we have a standard pareto shape with a rounded end, with a cap the way the cap is. And I'm going to use a giutine to straight cut, to show you how to cut it. Now what you want to do is I'm going to hold it over the ash tray here. You're going to take it, and you don't want to remove the entire cap. The cap is the rounded edge here. You want to just leave a little bit of the roundness on the end there because if you remove the whole cap the cigar will become unraveled. So I'm going to get just enough off of there to be able to draw smoke out of it. And this is what it should look like on the end, about, and then you want to brush the any excess off there. This is what it should look like after you've cut it. A nice even cut, just like that. You don't want to cut it way up here like I've seen some people do because, again, it will come unraveled. The next type of cut I want to show you is a wedge cut or V cut. This is not your typical wedge cut, it?s on the side instead of on the front, but it serves the same purpose. And what you do is you just take it vertically like this, place a cigar right there, it should, it has a nice guide there for you. You don't to worry about the length, and just let the blade come straight down on it. And what that does it just leaves a little wedge into the cigar feed to draw the smoke out of it. I'd prefer not to use a wedge cut, because you could end up damaging the cap and, again, it could come unraveled. To me there really is no point in the wedge cut but its all about personal preference. The next type is a punch. Again, I don't prefer a punch but some people do because they don't want to carry around a cutter for a couple of other reasons. What you do is you just gently take this end, place it into the head of the cigar and just gently wiggle it in there until it gets through the cap. And then you just pull it back out of there. And the cap should come straight off, but sometimes it doesn't. And all that does, as you see, it justs leaves a little hole in there for the punch. Now this is a different shape of a cigar. This is called a torpedo shape, and it just comes to a point at the head. And you're not going to use a wedge cut or a punch for that, you're going to have to use a straight cut. And again you just want to take just enough off to be able to draw smoke out of it. This is about how much you want you don't want to take it any further than that. Just like this and that?s about as much as you want to cut off on that."