Category: Beginner’s Guides
New to cigars? Start here. Learn the fundamentals of selecting, cutting, lighting, and enjoying your first cigars with our essential guides for beginners.
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Small Batch vs Large Production Cigars: Does Scale Affect Quality?
By Peter | VDG Cigars | Certified Cigar Sommelier I’ll tell you where I stand: I love small batch cigars. It comes down to two things — the tobacco and the craftsmanship. When a blender gets hold of leaf that has been aging for seven, eight, ten years and builds a cigar around it with…
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How to Buy Cigars Online: The Complete Buyer’s Guide
Buying cigars online is becoming more and more popular — and anyone who has been paying attention to the premium cigar market over the past five years already knows why. The selection available through a good online retailer is broader, the prices are sharper, and you can research at your own pace before committing to…
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Hand-Rolled vs Machine-Made Cigars: What Every New Smoker Should Know
If you are just getting into cigars, one of the first things worth understanding is the difference between a hand-rolled cigar and a machine-made one. Price is part of it, but the construction method goes deeper than that. It affects the tobacco inside, the way the cigar burns, the flavors you experience, and whether resting…
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Should Beginners Buy Cigars by the Box or Singles?
Starting out in cigars means making a lot of decisions before you even light up. One of the first — and most misunderstood — is whether to go for box or single cigars. Buy a full box or pick up singles one at a time. It sounds like a simple question. It isn’t. Get it…
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Smoking Cigars in Warm Weather: The Complete Guide
There is a summer session I keep coming back to. July, somewhere around seven in the evening, the heat had finally dropped to something tolerable. I had a cigar I had been meaning to smoke for three weeks. A glass of cold water on the table. An hour later I was still sitting there —…
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The Complete Cigar Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Premium Cigars
By Peter | VDG Cigars You are holding something that took years to grow, months to ferment, weeks to roll, and the hands of someone who has spent a lifetime learning how. Most people who smoke their first premium cigar do not know that. Most people who have smoked for years still do not know…
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Cigar Mold vs Plume: The Complete Guide to Telling Them Apart
You open your humidor and notice something white on your cigars. Your stomach tightens. Is it mold? Is it plume? Should you panic, toss them, or light one up without a second thought? This is one of the most common questions in cigar storage — and one of the most poorly answered. Most guides give…
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Best Time of Day to Smoke a Cigar
There is no universal answer. But there is a right answer for you — and finding it changes everything about how a cigar feels, tastes, and stays with you. Most people who ask “when is the best time to smoke a cigar?” are really asking something deeper: when will this actually be worth it? When…
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Can You Relight a Cigar?
Yes. But that answer comes with more weight than most guides bother to give it. Whether a relight is worth attempting depends on how long the cigar has been sitting, how it was stored, and what kind of cigar it was to begin with. Get those three things right and a relit cigar can smoke…
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How to Tell If a Cigar Is Good Quality
You pay good money for a cigar, set aside an hour, and it disappoints. The draw fights you. The burn runs sideways. The flavor turns harsh somewhere in the middle and you’re just waiting for it to end. That’s not bad luck. That’s a bad cigar. And in most cases, the signs were there long…
