Where the Hell Is the Coffee?

Cut. Light. Enjoy.

If that’s the only thing you do in this hobby, then you get what it’s all about. The rest is just an attempt to understand why. Inevitably, we want to understand why we like or dislike the cigars we smoke.

And that’s where tasting notes come in.

Unfortunately, tasting notes often get mistaken for the experience itself. A reviewer says coffee, black pepper, cedar, leather, or baking spice, and we start hunting for those exact things. Then, when we don’t find them, we assume our palate isn’t good or developed enough. But here’s the thing:

Tasting notes have nothing to do with our palates.

They have everything to do with our vocabulary.

That doesn’t mean our senses aren’t involved. Of course they are. We taste, smell, feel, and perceive the cigar in real time. But naming what we perceive is a separate act. That act depends on memory, association, comparison, and most importantly, language.

I will say this plainly: We all have the innate ability to taste thousands of flavors. But most of us haven’t learned how to wire what we taste into words.

That can be trained.

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise. The biggest difference between someone who can describe a plethora of flavors and someone who can’t is practice.

So, how do you practice?

First of all, let me say this plainly: it’s not rocket science. There’s no magic behind it. But before we get into the mechanics, I want to remind you that none of this is required to enjoy a cigar. Remember: Cut. Light. Enjoy. The rest is just an attempt to understand why.

While I write this, I’m smoking the new AJ Fernandez Amar. I have no intention of evaluating it right now. I just want to sit with it. I won’t review it until I’ve smoked three or four over the course of a month or so. I’m not interested in why I like it. I actually love it, but that’s beside the point. Right now, I’m only interested in enjoying it.

The why comes later.

But when I’m ready, I’ll review it. And when I do, I’ll use the same process I’m about to share with you.

Preparation

Put yourself in neutral. This is the most important step. Find a quiet, relaxing environment, free of distractions. Neutrality also applies to emotion. If you’re pissed off, distracted, anxious, rushed, or already riding some emotional high, it will affect how and what you taste. The point of emotional neutrality is to let the cigar drive your feelings.

Reset your palate. I talked about rinsing with water to help bring your mouth back toward neutral, but water alone doesn’t always clear the stage. Eating a couple of unsalted water crackers or a small piece of plain white bread, not sourdough, can help absorb lingering oils, spice, sweetness, acidity, or bitterness.

The goal isn’t to sterilize your mouth. The goal is to minimize interference before the cigar starts speaking.

Do a pre-light inspection. We don’t taste only with our tongues. We also taste with what we see, feel, smell, and hear.

How does the cigar feel in your hand? Is it solid? Is the rolling even? Are there protruding seams?

Bring it to your ear and gently roll it between your fingers. Do you hear the soft rustling of the filler, or does the wrapper make a crackling sound? If it crackles, the cigar may be a little dry.

Smell the wrapper and the foot. Do you notice any off-putting scents, like ammonia? If so, the cigar may need more time. If not, what do you smell? Don’t worry about vocabulary at this point. Is it pleasing?

Note that many cigars will present what is commonly known as “barnyard.” That usually means some combination of hay, earth, fermentation, mustiness, and a little manure. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s strong. But here’s the important thing: it will tell you very little about what the smoke actually tastes like.

Identifying Flavors

This is not an exact science because it lives in the realm of perception, memory, and imagination. When people say “everyone’s palate is different,” they usually aren’t talking about radically different physical receptors on the tongue. They’re talking about the way each person perceives, remembers, compares, and names what they experience.

That distinction matters.

A tasting note is not a chemical report. It is an association. When someone says they taste coffee, they usually don’t mean the cigar has turned into a cup of coffee. They mean something in the smoke reminds them of coffee: bitterness, roast, darkness, aroma, warmth, dryness, or some combination of those things.

That’s why the same sensation can become different words in different mouths. One smoker says black pepper. Another says spice. Another says heat. Another says bite. Another says sharpness on the retrohale. They may be describing the same basic event through different vocabularies.

Developing a vocabulary first requires understanding what we actually taste.

Our gustatory system, or sense of taste, detects five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, or savory.

But flavor is bigger than taste.

Taste happens mostly on the tongue. Flavor is the full experience created by taste, aroma, texture, temperature, irritation, memory, and association. That’s why coffee and cedar aren’t basic tastes. They’re flavor associations. Coffee may come from bitterness, roast, darkness, aroma, warmth, dryness, acidity, or char. Cedar may come from aromatic woodiness, dryness, sharpness, resin, or the memory of a humidor.

Pepper is different because it often feels like taste even when it isn’t. We’ll get to that in a moment.

So how do you identify different flavors?

It’s easier than you think. It just takes practice.

First, let’s say you notice sweetness. To give it a name, simply ask yourself, “What kind of sweetness is this?” Is it sugary like candy? Is it thick and gooey like molasses? Is it rich like honey? Once you find something that matches, or at least comes close, name it.

That’s it.

Then apply the same process to every other impression you encounter. Before you know it, you’ll have a working list of specific flavor names you’ve identified.

Like I said, it’s not rocket science.

What about pepper?

I separated pepper out because pepper isn’t a flavor in the same way as sweetness, bitterness, or sourness are. Pepper is tactile. It’s detected through our sense of touch more than our sense of taste. When we encounter pepper in a cigar, it usually shows up as sensation: heat, prickle, bite, dryness, sharpness, or irritation.

Black pepper often presents as a lighter heat with a darker, smoky character. Red pepper tends to feel a little brighter and more intense, sometimes with a vegetal edge.

The same process applies to pepper. Notice where it shows up, how intense it feels, and what it resembles. Is it light and smoky? Sharp and bright? Warm and vegetal? Once something fits, give it a name.

Identifying flavors is simply the practice of turning impressions into language. Taste gives you the basic categories, but flavor comes from the full experience of aroma, texture, temperature, irritation, memory, and association. Once you notice an impression, ask what it resembles. If it’s sweet, ask what kind of sweetness. If it’s woody, ask what kind of woodiness. If it’s pepper, notice the sensation and name how it feels. The process isn’t mystical. It’s vocabulary built through repetition.

The Problem with Thirds

This may annoy some people, but I don’t think thirds are the best way to understand a cigar.

They’re useful for organizing notes, but they can also create a false expectation that every cigar is supposed to change on schedule. A cigar doesn’t know it’s in the first third. It doesn’t know it’s supposed to introduce itself, develop in the middle, and wrap things up near the end.

It simply burns.

It doesn’t matter whether the cigar changes at the one-third or two-thirds mark. What matters is how it behaves over time. Some cigars transition clearly. Some deepen. Some compress. Some rotate. Some hold steady. None of those things is automatically good or bad.

The question is whether the experience holds together. The problem with thirds is that they can lead smokers to look for changes rather than ask whether the cigar works from beginning to end.

For instance, take the La Aurora Small Batch Lot No. 008. It has no clearly defined transitions. It’s a flavor bomb from beginning to end. Any sense of movement comes from the flavor list gradually building over time, but there are no real shifts, no ebbs and flows. It gives you what it has from the get-go.

And that’s fine. Not every cigar needs to travel. Some cigars succeed because they arrive fully formed and stay there.

I’m not saying thirds are useless. They’re useful for many cigars. Plenty of cigars do open, develop, and finish in a way that maps neatly onto that structure.

But not every cigar behaves that way.

Some cigars don’t transition cleanly. Some don’t move in stages. Some simply build, deepen, or hold steady. And if a cigar doesn’t fit the thirds model, that doesn’t mean the cigar is bad. It means the model isn’t the right tool for that particular experience.