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Learn · Smoking BasicsHow to Light a Cigar
Lighting a cigar is toasting, not torching... warm the foot until it glows on its own, and the flame never needs to touch the leaf.
Toast the foot
Hold the cigar at an angle over the flame with the foot... the open end... just above the tip of the fire, not in it. Rotate slowly. The comparison nearly every guide reaches for is toasting a marshmallow: close enough to cook, never actually touching. What you're doing is drying and charring the edge of the tobacco evenly, so the whole face of the cigar catches at once instead of one side racing ahead. Jam the foot straight into the flame and the leaf scorches... and the first ten minutes taste like the scorch.
The goal is a ring of glowing edges and a lightly blackened foot before the cigar ever reaches your mouth.
Rotate and puff
Once the foot is toasted, bring the cigar up and puff gently while still rotating it over the flame. Then take it out of your mouth, turn the foot toward you, and blow softly on it... a fully lit cigar glows evenly across the whole face. A dark crescent means one side didn't catch; give that spot a few more seconds of toast. Thirty extra seconds here saves a lopsided burn later.
Slow is the theme. Hard, fast puffs on a fresh light pull heat straight through the cigar, and heat is where harshness comes from... the same pacing rule that applies to the whole smoke starts at the light.
Torch, soft flame, or matches
- Torch lighter. A pressurized butane jet... hot, fast, and nearly windproof. The standard tool for most smokers. The same heat that makes it convenient makes it easy to scorch with, so keep extra distance between jet and foot.
- Soft flame lighter. Butane again, but a gentle open flame instead of a jet. Slower, harder to scorch with, and a favorite of smokers who like an unhurried light... it just loses badly to wind.
- Wooden matches. Perfectly workable, with one caveat: the head is sulfur, and sulfur in the first puff tastes like sulfur. Let the match burn down to bare wood before toasting. Long cigar matches exist for exactly this, and a full light may take two or three.
- The cedar spill. A thin strip of Spanish cedar... lit from a candle or match, then used to toast the foot. This is the old-world method, and the cedar is often said to flatter the tobacco on the way in. Slow, a little theatrical, and pleasant when there's no hurry.
What not to light with
The rule underneath all of it: butane burns without adding a flavor of its own, so butane is the standard. Fluid-and-wick lighters... the Zippo style... run on naphtha, and most guides agree the fuel taste rides straight into the smoke. If one is truly the only option, letting the flame burn for a few seconds first burns off some surface fuel... still a compromise. Candles are out for the same reason: wax and fragrance in the first puff. And a stove burner works about as well as it sounds.
Wind reality
Outdoors, theory meets weather. A soft flame in any real breeze is a fight you lose; the torch was built for exactly this. Wind also pushes the burn around after the light... expect more touch-ups and the occasional runaway burn line on the windward side. Shielding the light with a cupped hand or turning your back to the breeze helps more than a bigger flame does.
When it goes out
It will, eventually, and it's not a crisis... a purge and a proper relight bring most cigars back cleanly. That gets its own page: relighting and saving a cigar.
On the site
Four lighters have crossed the review bench: the Guevara Lux single flame... Buy Again after a year-plus of near-daily duty... the Jetline Rubanno, a Buy Again with caveats about balance and a hot top end, the Jetline Mr. Fatboy, a comically oversized quad torch that earned its Buy Again on pure fun, and the Rockwell quad torch... Wouldn't Buy at retail, decent as the promo freebie it usually is.