Home Humidors for Hand Rolled Cigars

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Matthew Driggers and we are here at Cigar Castle in Tampa, Florida 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 personal humidification, storing your cigars. This is a standard box humidor that you are going to buy at a store and take home. You have to have some place to put your cigars when you are not smoking them. The best thing to do is put them in a humidor. This is a box humidor; I'm going to open it up for you to see inside. It's got cedar wood on the inside which is the best thing for the cigars, best thing for storing them long term. It's nice, it's got, and this will fit a lot of cigars in it. The main thing you want to look for in a box humidor to take home is the tightening of the seal when it is closed. If we could possibly get a shot of right here, in this area, I'm going to close this. When you are going to the store to buy a humidor you want to test this by just, you are going to lift up, you are going to lift this up like this and just let it drop and there should be a slight delay there while the air rushes out. That gives you a tight seal and that insures that no air is going to get in there. The air is going to, you should be able to feel the air rushing out when you do that. But again there is a little delay there every time it's closed and that's what makes a really good personal humidor. Now when you first buy a humidor it might be a good idea to take some distilled water and put it on a rag, a damp rag, and just wet the inside of it first before you put the cigars in there and let it absorb the water into it and once it's dried a little bit, then you put the cigars in there. But also this is what you call, this is your humidifier that you will see in most standard box humidors and what you are going to do is you are going to fill it up with distilled water. Distilled water is the best kind of water to put in there because it is the purest form of water that you can buy. Soak it in there for about 24 hours and then put it up here, you know wherever, this one is magnetic, it's got a magnet on the inside of the lid and you just put it in there and it will stay and that way it keeps the cigars humidified. This is your hydrometer. This is an analog hydrometer. You'll see some that are digital, gives you a digital read out, this tells you the humidity level inside the humidor. You want to keep your personal humidity at 70%. This is optimal. You want to keep the temperature in the humidor 70 degrees and you want to keep the humidification level at 70%. Just remember 70/70. Now that can fluctuate within a couple of percentage points but generally you should shoot for 70/70."