Welcome back! By now you have most likely purchased your humidor and want to know what to do next. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT purchase any cigars yet!

Properly seasoning your humidor for cigar storage takes a little time. Please do not rush it! The idea of a humidor is to protect and preserve your precious puros. Take the time to season your humidor correctly.

With that said, here are the steps to season your humidor so you can store your new perfectos for as long as you want.

1. The first thing you must do is prepare your humidor. You do this by wiping the inside with a clean white cloth dampened with distilled water. Using distilled water and a white cloth is recommended since they contain no contaminants. Wiping the entire inside of your new humidor takes out all the dust which may have collected before you received it as well as helping to moisten the interior. Please be sure to wipe ALL of the wood surfaces, including the inside of the top and the complete insert(s) if any are included.
2. Now you want to place a glass or dish of distilled water into your new humidor and let it sit inside the closed humidor for about 3 days. You can speed this process a little by heating the water in a micro wave oven first. This will cut down your waiting time to about 1 day!
3. Now that you have the hard part out of the way, (Yea, I know, it’s kind of like waiting for your favorite dinner to go into the oven! ), it’s time to calibrate your hygrometer.
   • If you purchased a digital hygrometer you should skip this step.
   • Check the back of your analogue hygrometer to see if there is an adjustment screw. If not, you are up the proverbial creek. It’s recommended you purchase a higher quality hygrometer. If you have an adjustment screw, continue on.
   • The most accurate way to calibrate your hygrometer is with a salt solution. This is how you do it. Take a large spoon or a small cup filled with salt. Add a few drops of water, do not disolve the salt, rather moisten it well. Now you want to put your hygrometer and the spoon into a small enclosed space. You can use a zip lock bag for this. After about 8 hours, the inside of the bag should be at 75% humidity. Adjust your hygrometer to read 75%.
   • An alternative, but not as accurate, is to wrap your hygrometer in a warm damp cloth. After 1 hour, adjust your hygrometer to 95%.
4. OK! While you are doing all of that, you should soak your humidifier(s) in either distilled water or propylene glycol. Propylene glycol is really only needed about once every 2 months. Distilled water will suffice. Let your humidifier(s) soak for about an hour then remove, shake, and pat the surfaces dry.
5. I know you want to smack the heck out of me right now, but there is one last thing you should do. You have been diligent in seasoning your humidor, you have calibrated your hygrometer, your humidifiers are all set! What ELSE do I need to do? Moderate your humidors environment! Idealy you want to make sure it will maintain a 70% humidity at 70 degrees. Place your humidifiers into your humidor along with your hygrometer and let it sit for a day. Check it to see what the humidity is. If it is high, open the lid of your humidor for 30 minutes, shut the lid and check in 30 minutes. Do this until it maintains 70% humidity.

Once you have completed the above steps, go ahead and place your puros into the humidor. You will need to check the humidity daily since your cigars will absorb the humidity. You want it to stay at 70%! This is a rule-of-thumb. 65% to 75% is what cigar manufacturers say. My personal pleasure is 70% and 70 degrees.

What you should do. Raise and lower the humidity in your humidor until the smoking pleasure is what you like. The higher the humidity, the harder the draw. 70% humidity has given me the cleanest burn as well as a fluid draw. Since not all cigars are rolled alike, the filler will change how your cigar smokes. Please be aware of that.

That’s it for today! More on the way!
GB
Walter Gavurnik

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 2:50 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.