Articles tagged: "humidor"
1: Cigars Vs. Snuff: When One Form Of Tobacco Beat Out Another
The history of technology is littered with those ideas that didn't quite make it. HD-DVD got beaten out by Blu-Ray last year, just as DVD has, with time, supplanted VHS tapes like a better-equipped predator hunting another species to extinction.
2: The Science Of Smoking: How Smell Works
One of the worlds largest and most valuable jewel collections, the Imperial Crown Jewels of Persia, or Crown Jewels of Iran, consists of a mind-boggling number of treasures. On display at the Museum of The Treasury of National Iranian Jewels in Tehran, Iran, the collection ranges from breathtaking tiaras to jewel-studded swords to princely thrones, and much more.
3: The Science Of Smoking: How Taste Works
For most smokers, the science of taste is like the innards of your cigar lighter - you don't care how it works as long as it does. Still, it is - along with smell - the critical sense that allows you to enjoy the sensation of smoking, and learning more about how taste works may enable you to get more from your cigars.
4: Stogies And Slots: How To Plan A Cigar-Friendly Gambling Vacation
For many of us, casino gambling and cigar smoking go together like Frank and Bing. Generations of first-time Vegas visitors have enhanced their experience via frequent applications of cigar smoke, just like those iconic Rat Packers of yesteryear with their impeccable suits, suave manner, and constantly-replenished supplies of alcohol and tobacco.
5: The Politics Of Cigars: Don't Box Me In!
Cigars have long been a part of the iconography of American politics. On the negative side, early-twentieth-century newspaper cartoons symbolized the greed of villainous "party bosses" and robber barons by showing fat men lighting their stogies with one-hundred dollar bills.
6: Cigar Destinations: Festivals That Cater To Dedicated Smokers
Cigar smoking is all about shared pleasure. After all, it swept Victorian England and became a national pastime in part because it gave men something to do with their hands while they talked after dinner.
7: A Smoke At Sea: Cruise Ships Offer Smoking Vacations For Cigar Fans
A few years ago, in 2006, the Nevada legislature imposed a public smoking ban. The new rule doesn't apply - as yet - to the storied casinos of Las Vegas, where smoking is still allowed on gaming floors.
8: Cigar-Loving Cities In A Smoke-Banning World
However others may feel about them, there 's no doubt that public-smoking bans, and other restrictions on tobacco use, leave cigar aficionados burning up. Anyone who reads cigar magazines will know that this is one legislative trend all those magazines' writers seem to agree on.
9: Cigar Festivals Make Your Calendar Go Up In Smoke
Cigar smoking is the most social of pleasures. And with bans on public smoking enacted in almost thirty states, covering half the United States population, cigar smokers must be feeling more and more like an embattled minority.
10: Cigar History Destinations: Florida Landmarks
Cigars have been with us for thousands of years - far too long for any historian, however dedicated, to trace. Tobacco may have grown on this planet (according to current speculation by paleontologists) for as long as eight thousand years, and archaeological data suggests it 's been smoked for at least four thousand.
11: Celebrate Good Times With Cigars!
It 's no surprise that we tend to give cigars as gift items at weddings, bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, and new births, or that cigars remain popular gift item ideas for new dads, new moms, new brides and grooms, and newly engaged couples. After all, cigars have been associated with celebration and ceremony, with marking the moment, for as long as they've existed.
12: Cigar Smoking At Newborn Baby Celebrations
The origins of those customs surrounding birth, death and marriage are perhaps the hardest to trace. After all, these are among the oldest and least negotiable facts of human experience (along with eating, government, inclement weather, the sense of the sacred, and, perhaps, bad sitcom reruns).
13: What Do You Get The Cigar Smoker Who Has Everything?
Cigar lovers - by reputation - tend not to be the kind of people it 's hard to buy gifts for. After all, cigar smoking is an activity commonly associated with class, a sense of affluence, an interest in the finer things in life.
14: Yachting: A Sport For The Leisured
Boating is perhaps the most romantic of all sports, with its aura of long days on deck, of old sea salts' talk, of rope-related knowhow and words like "keelhaul" and "stern," its echoes of Melville and Popeye and of Robert Shaw 's character in the movie Jaws.
15: V-Cutter, Cigar Guillotine Or What? A Cigar Smoker 's Weapon Of Choice
Many first-time smokers don't even realize that good cigars (and even bad ones) have to be cut open before they're smoked. Nor do they realize that, for this task, it 's not a good idea to go grabbing that pair of blunted old rusty scissors you keep in the "handies" drawer, or that steak knife in your kitchen, or any other device that wasn't intended for this use.
16: Honduras: The Home Of Tobacco
Those who love cigars know that Honduras is one of the world 's best places to make them. After all, this Latin American country has been a prime tobacco-growing location for centuries.
17: Camping: A Necessity And A Luxury
Camping - it 's a brute necessity, and one of the most refined and civilized of pleasures. Our remote ancestors would not have survived and evolved without the ability to build protective shelters in the wild - the wiliness and courage to gather or track down their food - and, perhaps most of all, the resourcefulness to entertain themselves and each other in the long evenings before civilization.
18: Nicaragua: The Tobacco-Producing Country That Endures
To cigar smokers, Nicaragua is already legendary. Through regime change, social upheaval, and revolution, this Latin American nation has produced some of the world 's finest tobacco.
19: Sport Shooting: We Owe It All To The Civil War
We all know about the important role that guns play in American recreation. Consider such facts as the profusion of hunting magazines available on any newsstand; the huge number of duck blinds that can be seen in any woods; the fact that every town and hamlet has its driving range;
20: Hunting And Survival: Some Tips For Beginners
Hunting is as old as humanity. Fossil evidence indicates that early humans were hunting with spears as long as 16,200 years ago, and scientists estimate that we've been eating meat much longer than that - for nearly two million years, a span of time that long predates the emergence of homo sapiens.
21: Camping: A Necessity And A Luxury
Camping - it 's a brute necessity, and one of the most refined and civilized of pleasures.
22: Cigars And Music: A Natural Combination
Perhaps it 's because there 's a close cultural connection between great music and smoky bars. Anyone who knows anything about jazz knows that its truly legendary improvisers - Coltrane, Bird, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie - cut their teeth playing in bars so smoky that it 's a good thing everybody was too busy improvising to need sheet music.
23: Boxing: An Ancient Tradition, A Necessary Skill
Obviously, no one knows when the first fistfight took place; nor do we have much of a clue when the art of smacking folks in the face began to be codified, the rules written down, judges and evaluators brought in.
24: The Wide World Of Cigars
To look at the rankings, the world 's best cigars seem to come from only a few countries: Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and (unfortunately for Americans, who can't buy the country 's products) Cuba.
25: The Stogie Diaspora: How Revolution And Embargo Created Today 's Cigar Industry
Among cigar smokers, it is always just "the embargo." After all, though governments declare trade and other kinds of embargoes for various reasons all the time, no other such order has so affected the lives of those who smoke cigars as has the United States' trade embargo against Cuba, created by executive order by John F. Kennedy in 1962 and in force ever since.
26: Cigars From Everywhere: A Look At The Best Cigars From Two Nations
The best cigars in the world, if you're just looking at rankings, tend to come from only a few countries, most of them Latin American: Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and those banned-in-America Cuban cigars that everyone talks about.
27: Where Do The Best Cigars Come From? A Country-By-Country Look
Though the first word that comes to many minds in reference to "cigars" is, of course, "Cuba," great cigars come from all over the world. And, in fact, the expertise that went into making Cuba such a cigar powerhouse for so long (as it remains today) has been dispersed to other countries - as a result of some of the same historical upheavals...
28: Cigar Bars To The Rescue
When, in the early 1990s, the premium cigar industry rebounded after years of stale sales figures and slackening consumer interest, it faced a new social climate. More and more municipalities and states had passed anti-smoking legislation throughout the eighties, and this trend only continued through the 1990s and beyond.
29: Cigars In Brazil: An Uncertain Future?
Those who know their cigars well also, by that same token, know Brazil - albeit as a source of great tobacco rather than as a top cigar-producing nation. Brazilian tobacco, mainly produced in the country 's temperate northeastern and southern regions, turns up in such world-class cigars as Carlos Torano 's Toro, but the country 's cigar producers themselves haven't always gotten the same respect.
30: Writers (And Their Books!) For Cigar Lovers
In his essay "Sifting the Ashes," the writer Jonathan Franzen has the following to say about the smoking habit he struggles to quit: "[W]hen you're smoking, you're acutely present to yourself: you step outside the unconscious forward rush of life."
31: Father 's Day Cigars: A Great Gift Idea
We hand them out during bachelor parties. We give them to new fathers. We hand them out to potential business partners and employees ("Sit down. Have a cigar.").
32: It 's A Cigar World After All
Though the first country many of us think of when it comes to great cigars is, of course, Cuba, the fact is that great tobacco, skilled rollers and serious craftsmanship can be found all over the world.
33: Cigars and The History of Bachelor Parties
As with most marriage customs, it 's hard to pin down exactly when and how the bachelor party developed. Some writers compare them to Viking funerals - just as those ancient warriors robustly celebrated the life of a fallen comrade, sending him off to Valhalla with great gusto, an engaged man 's single friends arrange a lusty sendoff for that man 's adolescence, his years as a carefree bachelor.
34: What Drinks Go Best With Cigars
The signs are everywhere: more and more Americans are interested again in the idea of using their homes to entertain friends and associates.
35: What To Serve With Cigars
The signs are everywhere: America is, increasingly, a taste-conscious country. After decades of fast food, people are talking about the "slow-food" movement. Magazines like Gourmet, Food and Martha Stewart Living appeal to more and more peoples' desire to eat well, not just copiously.
36: Alpine Skiing: A Sport For The Bold
Downhill skiing requires a combination of athleticism, leisure, privilege, and the devil-may-care attitude that allows participants to enjoy the thrill of, essentially, falling down a steep snow-covered mountain, over and over again. It 's not a sport for the faint at heart.
37: A Contemplative Person 's Recreation: Fishing
For Americans in landlocked areas, it may be easy to forget how central fishing is to the world 's economies and cultures. So feast on this whopper of a statistic: two hundred million people owe their jobs (directly or indirectly) to fisheries.
38: Where Do All The Cigar Aficionados and Tobacco Smokers Live?
For the cigar industry, the past fifteen years has been the best of times - and the worst of times. On the one hand, the 1990s saw the renaissance of cigar smoking in the United States after decades in which competition from cigars, an aging customer base of cigar aficionados, and lack of interest in cigars among younger smokers all took their toll on the industry.
39: Cigars: A Creative Wedding Gift
We hand out cigars during bachelor parties, of course - in fact, it may be hard to imagine the tradition without one. Ditto bachelorette parties, with their air of carnivale and tit-for-tat debauchery. As for the birth of newborns, the practice of lighting up a stogy to celebrate a new arrival has been firmly entrenched by the centuries.
40: How To Plan A Smoke-Friendly Trip
From one perspective, the dramatic rebound of premium cigars couldn't have come at a better time. After decades of competition from cigarettes, the gradual deterioration (through age) of its customer base, and decreased consumer interest in tobacco products generally, the sudden early-nineteen-nineties resurgence of interest in premium cigars was instrumental in keeping the industry alive.
41: A Cigar Sampler Party: A Great Party Idea
For those who do a lot of entertaining, it 's hard to come up with new party themes. But the recent popularity of cigars offers a great creative party idea for stressed-out would-be party hosts.
42: How To Tell A Real Cuban Cigar From The Fakers
Perhaps it 's that revolutionary history. Perhaps it 's the cultural memories of Ernest Hemingway with a lit stogie, contemplating Havana.
43: Plays And Movies For Cigar Lovers
Since so many artists, writers, and other creative folks have been cigar smokers, it 's perhaps no surprise that some wonderful - as well as not-so-wonderful - films and plays center on the world of cigars. Some of these works are already well-known, while others might require a little help reaching their audiences.
44: Novelists And Cigars: A Long-Running Romance
Like coffee, alcohol and other, somewhat more illicit pleasures, cigars have a longtime fascination for certain kinds of creative folks. Perhaps this is especially true of novelists, whose work compels them to sit staring at a page for hours a day, typing, looking for any small pleasure to momentarily enliven their bored senses.
45: History And Popularity Of Cigars
Who smoked the first cigar We'll never know, of course, but archeological finds suggest an early date indeed
46: Tips For Novices On How To Smoke Cigars
Many novice smokers have embarrassed themselves trying to smoke a cigar with the same frantic, huff-and-puff energy that goes into cigarette smoking But cigars aren't cigarettes, any more than cheap beer is fine wine, and just as you'd never guzzle a fine Cabernet Sauvignon, you shouldn't just inhale a cigar
47: The History (And Value) Of Cigar Bands
For many cigar smokers, the small paper band encircling their stogy is just a piece of trash, to be discarded along with the shrinkwrap around the box But for others that cigar band is a bit of history - a collectible that adds immeasurably to the romance and mystique of smoking
48: How Do Cigars Get Rated?
The cigar ratings supplied by publications like Cigar Magazine and Cigar Aficionado form an important part of the modern cigar industry For cigar smokers, these ratings provide guidance in a crowded market
49: Around The World In Three Tobaccos
Many of us live, and think, as if "nature" and "culture" were separate things, kept apart by a porous but clear boundary. In fact, it 's usually hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
50: How To Smoke Premium Cigars: Deciding Where To Start
For the past fifteen years or so, the market for this once-nearly-moribund luxury has been on an impressive rebound. From its height in the 1850s - when Cuba alone exported 356.6 million cigars - until the early 1990s, the cigar market had badly declined, falling victim to competition from cigarettes and then to declining American interest in smoking generally;
