…then I realized that I had loaded it with a new shipment of cigars. Since I got a bunch of premium cigars, I decided to put them in my humidor while moving my dailies into the ziplock bags with humidification pillows.
Once I did that my relative humidity dropped to 66%. It has since climbed to 68% since yesterday, and that’s a good thing, but it is an indication of how the new cigars were sucking up all the moisture.
Frankly, I don’t know how accurate the barometer is in my humidor. But it is digital and I would trust it over an analog barometer.
People have mentioned in forums and reviews how dried out cigars can be when they arrive. As a beginner, I didn’t know that that was the thing. But after having cigars that have had some humidor time, there is a huge difference between those cigars that have not laid down for a while and those that have laid down.
If you hear any crackle in a cigar when you roll it between your fingers, then you know that it needs some time to moisturize. I always wondered about how to check if a cigar was moist enough and I had read that rolling it between your thumb and forefinger to listen for crackling was how you checked.
I got my first indication of that from the movie American Gangster when Armand Assand pulled the stick from his humidor and brought it to his ear while rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. I always wondered why he did that and when I learned that that was the technique for checking for moisteness, then I understood. The last time I saw the movie it made me wonder if he was a cigar afficionado.
Unco B's Stogie Diary 