How Cigars Are Made: Every Stage, Seed to Shop

The cigar in your hand took longer to make than most people think, and almost none of that time was spent rolling it.

Rolling is the last few minutes. Everything before it is agriculture and patience.

The seed and the field

Cigar tobacco is grown from seed in a covered seedbed, then transplanted to the field once the seedlings are strong enough to survive it.

The first decision that shapes the final cigar happens here. Sun grown or shade grown. Leaf grown under full sun gets thicker, oilier and darker, with more of everything. Leaf grown under cloth gets thinner and finer, which is why most pale wrappers come from under shade.

Priming

The leaves are not picked all at once. They come off in stages from the bottom of the plant upward, over several weeks, and each stage is called a priming.

This matters more than almost anything else, because position on the plant determines character.

The lowest leaves, volado, get the least sun and carry the least flavour. They burn well. They are there to keep the cigar lit.

The middle leaves, seco, carry more aroma and moderate strength.

The upper leaves, ligero, sit closest to the sun, grow thickest, and carry the most oil, the most nicotine and the slowest burn. A blender uses ligero sparingly and places it in the centre of the bunch, because it burns slowly and needs the surrounding leaf to keep it even.

When someone tells you a cigar is strong, they are usually telling you there is a lot of ligero in it.

Medio tiempo, the leaf above the ligero

On some plants there is one more priming above the ligero, and it has its own name.

Medio tiempo is one or two small leaves that sprout right at the top. They are smaller than ligero, thicker and more concentrated, usually left on the plant longer, and often fermented on their own because they do not behave like the leaf around them. Growers put the share of plants that produce them at somewhere around ten to fifteen percent.

Do the arithmetic and you see what that means for a blender. One or two small leaves, on a minority of plants. It is why most brands save medio tiempo for a limited edition rather than a regular production cigar. Cohiba used it in the Behike series, which is the reason most smokers have heard the name at all.

The more interesting case is a brand that does not treat it as an occasional luxury. When I wrote about La Flor de Zaida, what struck me was that medio tiempo goes into every blend they make. Given how little any crop yields, that constrains how many cigars you can produce, which is a harder commitment than it sounds.

What it gives a blend is weight, spice and a darker sweetness, the depth that separates a cigar you remember from one you simply smoked. It is the most concentrated leaf the plant will ever produce, and having enough of it to build a blend around is something very few makers ever get to do.

Curing

The picked leaves hang in a barn. Not to dry out, exactly, but to change.

Over several weeks the leaf turns from green to yellow to brown as the chlorophyll breaks down. The barn is managed with ventilation rather than heat, opening and closing to control humidity, and the pace is set by the weather rather than by a schedule.

Get this stage wrong and the leaf is ruined before it ever reaches fermentation.

Fermentation, where cigar tobacco becomes cigar tobacco

This is the stage most smokers have never heard of, and it is the one that decides how a cigar will treat you.

The cured leaf is stacked into large piles called pilones. The weight and the moisture generate heat inside the pile, and that heat, together with the microbes working through the leaf, drives a chemical change.

This is where the ammonia goes, and it is the single most important thing that happens to tobacco between the field and your hand. Cured leaf is still full of ammonia and other harsh compounds, and they are what makes raw tobacco unsmokable. Fermentation breaks them down. The bitterness leaves with them.

Sugars and oils redistribute at the same time, but clearing out the harshness is the point of the whole stage. It is also why a rushed fermentation cannot be put right later. Nothing further down the line removes what fermentation was supposed to remove.

The pile is watched by temperature. When it reaches its limit the whole thing is taken apart and rebuilt with the outer leaves moved inward, so that everything ferments evenly. Then it goes again.

How many rounds, and for how long, is a blender’s decision. Most factories work in a range of six to eight weeks in the pilón.

Some go considerably further. When I interviewed Carlo Corazza of Brun del Ré I asked him twice whether his fermentation really ran longer than most, because the number seemed implausible.

“Yes,” he said. “Because that’s more than one year.”

He was blunt about why most producers do not. “We don’t do it like the big companies quick. Ferment quick, do that quick. It’s not the same.”

On his own method he was shorter still. “We do it by the book.”

More than a year in the pilón, and then at least six months of resting after the cigars are rolled. Set that against six to eight weeks and you understand why two cigars at the same price can be completely different objects.

Corazza also gave me the clearest explanation of ageing I have heard from anyone in the industry. “The tobacco is like a sponge. They absorb. And so the more, the older they get.”

Ageing

After fermentation the leaf rests. Baled, stored, left alone.

Ageing is not fermentation. Nothing dramatic is happening, and that is exactly the point. Fermentation did the violent work. Ageing is the slow finish, and it is where quality separates itself from competence.

Two things improve. The edges that fermentation knocked off keep softening, so leaf that was merely smokable turns smooth. And the flavours stop sitting next to each other and begin to combine. A young blend tastes like its parts. An aged one tastes like one thing.

A year is common. Several years is not unusual for the leaf that ends up in the better blends, and it is the clearest reason two cigars built from the same recipe, one rushed and one rested, are not the same cigar at all.

Sorting

Before anything is rolled, the leaf is sorted. By priming, by colour, by size, by texture.

Wrapper leaf is sorted hardest, because a wrapper has to be flawless. It is the one leaf on the cigar you can see, and shades are graded finely enough that a box of cigars can be matched by eye.

Rolling

Now the part everyone pictures.

The roller takes the filler leaves and bunches them, folding rather than crushing, because the fold is what makes the air channels that let a cigar draw. A badly bunched cigar is plugged no matter what else goes right.

The bunch goes into a binder leaf, then into a mould where it is pressed to shape. Then the wrapper goes on, stretched and wound around the cigar at an angle, and finished with a cap cut from the same leaf and fixed with a little vegetable gum.

Two people often work as a pair, one bunching and one wrapping. A roller working on premium cigars produces a few hundred a day, fewer for difficult shapes.

Quality control and the ageing room

Finished cigars are weighed, measured, checked for draw and inspected for appearance. Rejects go back.

What passes goes into an ageing room, often for weeks or months, where the components marry. The wrapper, binder and filler sit together long enough to trade oils and moisture, and the cigar stops tasting like three separate leaves. A cigar smoked straight off the rolling table is not the same cigar it will be after it has rested.

The band, the cellophane and the box

This is the part almost every guide skips, and it is far more deliberate than it looks.

The band goes on one cigar at a time, usually after the cigar has rested, and on a figurado or a box pressed cigar it has to sit straight on a shape that is not round. If you want the name and purpose of every part of a cigar, I broke it down in cigar anatomy.

The cellophane is not just there to keep fingerprints off. It is made from cellulose rather than plastic, so it breathes, which means a cigar carries on ageing inside it. It also stops a cigar taking on the smell of whatever is sitting next to it on a shop shelf.

The box is the last blending decision anyone makes. Before the cigars go in they are sorted by wrapper shade and matched by eye, so that the box opens as one set rather than as twenty different browns. Somebody stood at a table and graded those by colour. That is why it looks the way it does when you lift the lid.

And the box keeps working after you have paid for it. Most are made from Spanish cedar or lined with it, which holds humidity steady, discourages tobacco beetles, and slowly lends its own character to the cigars inside. The box is not packaging. It is the last room the cigar ages in.

Why this takes years, and why it is still cheap

Add it up. A growing season. Weeks in the curing barn. Six to eight weeks in fermentation, or more than a year if the maker is willing. A year or more of ageing before anything is rolled. Then the rolling, then months more resting, then sorting, banding and boxing.

The cigar you light tonight was a seed several years ago.

Now count the people. Someone planted it. Someone picked each priming by hand, at the right moment, over weeks. Someone read the weather and worked the barn. Someone built the pilón, took its temperature, pulled it apart and built it again. Someone graded the leaf by colour and texture. Two people bunched and wrapped it. Someone checked the draw. Someone matched the box by eye.

None of that can be rushed, and almost none of it can be automated. The knowledge is not written down anywhere either. It passes from one pair of hands to the next, which is why a factory’s reputation takes decades to build and one bad season to lose.

Then look at the price. In my price guide I put the premium range at fifteen to twenty five dollars, and a good deal of what I smoke sits below that. For comparison, that is a decent glass of wine in a restaurant, gone in twenty minutes. The cigar took three or four years and a chain of skilled hands to reach you, and it will hold your attention for an hour.

Measured against what actually goes into one, the premium cigar is among the cheapest luxuries you can buy. If you want to know what the extra money buys as you move up the range, I went through that in what you get for the price. That is what I think about when somebody complains about the price.

FAQ

What is the difference between curing and fermentation?

Curing is drying and colour change in a barn over weeks. Fermentation is a heat driven chemical change in a stacked pile that removes harshness and redistributes oils. Curing comes first and fermentation does the work that makes tobacco smokable.

What does fermentation actually remove from tobacco?

Ammonia and the other harsh compounds that cured leaf still carries. They are what make raw tobacco unsmokable, and breaking them down is the entire purpose of the stage. Sugars and oils redistribute at the same time, but the harshness is what has to go.

What is a pilón?

The pile of leaf used for fermentation. The weight and moisture generate heat, which drives the chemical change. The pile is dismantled and rebuilt several times so every leaf ferments evenly.

What do ligero, seco and volado mean?

They are the primings, meaning positions on the plant. Ligero is the upper leaf, strongest and slowest burning. Seco is the middle, more aromatic. Volado is the lower leaf, mildest, used for burn. Some plants also grow medio tiempo above the ligero.

What is medio tiempo?

One or two small leaves that sprout at the very top of some tobacco plants, above the ligero priming. They are thicker and more concentrated than ligero, are often left on the plant longer, and are usually fermented separately. Cohiba Behike made the name famous.

Is medio tiempo really that rare?

Yes. Growers put the share of plants that produce it at roughly ten to fifteen percent, and those plants give only one or two small leaves each. That is why it usually appears in limited editions rather than in regular production.

Which cigars use medio tiempo?

Cohiba Behike is the one that made the name known. La Flor de Zaida is the more unusual case, because medio tiempo goes into every blend they make rather than into a single annual release as many other producers do.

How long does it take to make a premium cigar?

Years, counting from seed. The rolling itself takes minutes. Everything before it is growing, curing, fermenting and ageing, and that is where the time goes.