Ugh! Burn and Draw Issues

Pictured above is one my all-time favorite sticks, the Tatuaje Nicaragua 7th Broadleaf. For me, it’s one of those sticks that never disappoints. Its flavor notes hit perfectly for my palate! Like the Undercrown Maduro, this is one stick I could smoke all day long.

This morning though, when I got about a third of the way through, I noticed that it wasn’t producing much smoke per puff. And sure enough, looking at the ash, I saw a tunnel near the center. Not a problem. I took out my PerfectDraw, ran a flame over the end and all was well. But right after the first half, it started tunneling again! Again, not a big deal. I gave it a couple more pokes with my PerfectDraw and didn’t have a problem to the end.

There are some folks who won’t tolerate issues like this and will chuck a cigar if they experience it more than once, and if it’s a particularly bad issue like a stick being plugged beyond repair (I guess I’ve been lucky in never experiencing plugging at that level), they’ll go as far as dismissing the brand altogether – or at least that’s what they say. Frankly, I think it’s BS. This is why there are tools such as the PerfectDraw to help with plugging. Hell! I used to use bamboo skewers to unplug cigars!

But here’s the thing. Issues like this, while sometimes annoying, don’t bother me much. The reason they don’t is because I keep in mind some important things: 1) Cigars are made of natural ingredients. There’s always going to be variability and, 2) Cigars are hand rolled which adds even more variability on top of the natural ones. The net is that you’re sometimes going to get uneven burn and tunneling.

To be honest, this is a bit of a reverse rant as I recently read of someone chucking a cigar because they couldn’t unplug it. When I read that, I just shook my head and muttered, “I guess they didn’t try hard enough.”

To me, cigars are a culinary item like food. So, no matter what I paid for a particular stick I have a real problem with waste. Plus, the engineer in me always wants to find a solution to a problem so if I have a cigar that’s plugged or a cigar that is tunneling or a cigar that has an uneven burn I’m going to try to fix it. But that’s just me. And as I said above while these problems can be mildly annoying, they’re just not big enough to get so pissed that I’d chuck the stick or dismiss the brand altogether.