For those of you who’ve asked for our recommendation when you’re having trouble deciding, the first beer we bring up is Magic Hat #9. Its not very common down here in Fort Myers, or in Southwest Florida for that matter. There’s only a handful of restaurants that carry the beer on draft. But, after one sip, you’ll agree– it’s a great beer.
Magic Hat Brewing Company is a microbrewery located in South Burlington, Vermont. It began production in 1994 in Burlington, Vermont, and moved to its current location in 1997. Year round beers include #9,Circus Boy, and Single Chair Ale. Seasonal brews include Blind Faith, Wacko, Jinx, Hex, hI.P.A., and Howl. We carry Magic Hat #9, Hex, hI.P.A, and Odd Notion.
The bottle description is as follows…
A beer cloaked in secrecy. An ale whose mysterious and unusual palate will swirl across your tongue and ask more questions than it answers. A sort of dry, crisp, refreshing, not-quite pale ale. #9 is really impossible to describe because there’s never been anything else quite like it.
Here at Cigar Cutters, we tend to agree!
The Stats…
TYPE: Not Quite Pale Ale
YEAST: English Ale
HOPS: Cascade, Apollo
MALTS: Pale, Crystal
ABV: 5.1
GRAVITY: 11.20 Plato
BITTERNESS: 20
SRM: 9.0
To properly enjoy a cigar, you must properly light the cigar.
The “toasting of the foot” correctly will certainly add to the flavor and enjoyment of the cigar. To properly toast the foot, use a butane lighter and toast around the outside edge of the foot(the end you light). Go around the edge until you see it red, and start to toast the inside of the foot until it also turns red. All of this is taking place without the cigar in your mouth. It will take longer than you expect, at least on a good cigar, and you will want to see the whole end red hot upon contact of the flame, before you start to smoke it. If you pull the flame away and blow lightly on the end, you will see the entire foot turn red, if you see areas that are still black, continue to toast it. When when whole end is red, take some puffs on the smoking end.
Quick light puffs will be best, and turn the cigar around to take a glimpse to ensure that you have it covered.
Snap, Crackle & Pop is the sound that you will hear smoking cigars with beetles.
If you were able to discover the fact that you have beetles from the small holes they use to bore through your cigars, they make a snap when you smoke them, so that is your sure giveaway. If you discover that you have them, not to worry(too much), but you need to do something about it. You will need to review your entire cigar collection. For safe measure, you need to treat ALL of the cigars, regardless of whether they have visible signs of beetles or not. You can separate out the bad from the good and put them each in freezer containers (Tupperware). Put them in and give it a week. The eggs can’t survive past a week at freezing, and the adults about the same just above freezing.
You will kill everything off, and then can reintroduce humidity slowly to the cigars in the coming days. One final note, if you keep the cigars at room temperature or below, and use a Spanish cedar lined humidor, you will reduce your likelihood of getting them.
This is the beginner guide to blowing smoke rings with a cigar, and impressing all of your friends!
The easiest way to start is with a cigar that has a good draw, and a larger ring gauge will provide a decent amount of smoke to perfect it. You can probably learn in the first half of the cigar, and work on the advanced method the second half. You also will want to learn indoors, because it doesn’t have wind as a factor. If you aren’t allowed to smoke cigars indoors at your house, take a trip to your favorite cigar bar. Light the cigar properly, as described in previous blogs, and draw in to your mouth as normal, of course without inhaling. If you make a fish kiss face(for lack of a better description) and lightly tap your cheek. You can tap quickly and see the small rings. Once you have that down, you can open your mouth slightly more to get some larger rings. If you inhale the same and then make a very weak, light cough, is the way to start doing it without tapping your cheek.
There are lots of great movies on the internet with better visuals of how to do the latter, I would suggest watching a quick clip of one of those to get going.
On the occasion of the first blog, we decided to try and save a few cigars from the perils of refrigerators and freezers and give our readers and customers a couple pointers on how we believe you should store your cigars.
Ideally, you would have a humidor that maintains 70/70, which is 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 70 percent relative humidity. Understand that keeping at, or even near, these conditions as a constant is a lot of work and in some cases nears impossible. Let us first dispell a couple ideas, such as storage in the fridge. In the short term this is OK, but over time will start to negatively affect your cigars. The fridge has a couple setbacks, one being the other items in the fridge, whereby your cigar can start to take on some of the flavors. One of the bigger setbacks is mold. If you leave them long term, you are putting them at some risk for getting mold. A setback that stems from both your fridge and freezer is the dehydration. A freezer will dehydrate and also makes you plan far ahead for smoking. The cigar will need time to get back to room temperature, and if you smoke it too early, may crack from the heat of the smoke against portions of the cigar still frozen. A freezer may be required if you get tobacco beetles, which you will read about treating in a future post, because this is a sure way to kill them.
If you have a small humidor, great, and if you can keep it relatively close, you will be in good shape. The setback with a small humidor is that you will need to make sure that you are keeping up with the humidity, not daily, but avoid the large swings in humidity, and try not to let them get too humid because of mold concerns. The small bags that they sell at many cigar shops are a great way to humidify, just
be sure not to let the humidity source touch any cigars. A note about humidifiers is to not have them airtight, again because of mold, it needs to breath a little bit. If you can’t afford a humidor or are waiting to get one as a present, a tupperware container with a humidity source and a corner of it open to breath will work. We will focus more on walk-in humidors(awesome!) and how to select a good humidor in future posts. In the meantime, try and keep things as constant as possible, without becoming burdened by it, and if you enjoy it when you light it, it is right for you!
