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Learn ยท Taste & BurnTaste and Burn
A cigar reports on itself the whole time it's lit: through the draw, the burn line, the ash, the smoke on the retrohale, and the flavor in each third. This shelf is about learning to read those signals, and about what the wrapper, band, and box tell you before you ever light it.
The technique of cutting and lighting is on the smoking basics shelf. This one starts the moment the cigar is lit, and it's the shelf every review on this site leans on hardest. When a review says a cigar canoed, needed a touch-up, or turned bitter at the nub, the words are defined here.
Read in this order
- How to taste a cigar: building a palate from scratch, in thirds, with the retrohale.
- The retrohale: tasting smoke through the nose, and how to start without coughing.
- Flavor vocabulary: the note families, and why notes are resemblances, not ingredients.
- The draw: tight, loose, and plugged, what causes each, and the standard fixes.
Burn and draw problems
- Cigar troubleshooting: something wrong mid-smoke? The symptom index.
- Burn issues glossary: canoeing, tunneling, runners, touch-ups, relights, and purges.
- Fixing a tight draw: re-cuts, massage, the draw tool, and when to give up.
- Why does my cigar taste bitter?: the usual causes, from pace to storage, and the fix for each.
- The nub: why cigars turn bitter at the end, and when putting one down is the right call.
The ash
- Ash management: when to tap, when to let it ride, and how to ash without killing the ember.
- Reading the ash: what color and stack say about soil and storage. And don't say about quality.
Before you light it
- Reading the wrapper: tooth, veins, oil, color evenness, and telling plume from mold.
- Cigar bands: what a band tells you, what a second band means, and when to take one off.
- Reading a cigar box: date stamps, factory marks, and what the box can't tell you.
How the reviews use this
Every review here is written in thirds, names the draw and the burn as facts rather than complaints, and reports the retrohale separately from the mouth. The format is decoded at how to read a WSA review, and the four-tier verdict scale it feeds is explained on the scale.
Keep reading
- Smoking basics: cut, light, pace, relight
- Wrappers: what the leaf you're reading actually is
- Storage: half of all burn problems start there