How to Relight a Cigar
How to Properly Relight Your Cigar
Should you relight a cigar if it goes out, or move on to another stick? In order to help you preserve your cigars and continue an enjoyable smoking experience, Chief Certified Tobacconist, Chris Gwaltney, has outlined the steps on how to properly relight a cigar.
“The key thought to remember is that it is okay to relight a cigar immediately, but it is not okay to relight a cigar many hours or days later,” says Gwaltney. If you leave a cigar in an ashtray and come back the next day, you will notice it does not smell the same. A cigar that has sat out for long periods of time can go rancid and smell bad. If a cigar smells bad, the taste will be even worse. However, if the cigar just went out, you can relight it and continue smoking.
Steps to Relight a Cigar
Relighting a cigar can be a simple task if you understand how to do it properly. If you have a cigar that has some ash on it, you may think the first step in the process would be to light the ash.
“You don’t want to do that,” says Gwaltney. “First thing you want to do is remove the ash. It is burnt tobacco and carbon monoxide that would cause your first puffs to be recycling burnt material.”
The burnt taste can take a while to come out of your palate and is not something you want to experience. Make sure to get all the ash off by gently tapping it using the head of your lighter. Once you have removed the ash and are starting with a clean slate, toast the cigar just like you would during the initial light. Keep it nice and even while starting to puff. By following these steps, your experience smoking a relit cigar will be as it was when you originally took your first few puffs.
How Long is too Long?
When relighting a cigar, doing so any time during the smoking experience is fine if you follow the steps above. There are some people who say you may smoke a cigar, set it down and then relight it the next day if you clip it. In order to do this, you must take your guillotine cutter and cut above the ash line where there is no burn or char. That will be a better experience than smoking the [day old] rancid cigar, however it still won’t be the same as the primary smoke. Some of the oils in the tobacco have already been burned and heated up.
“Yes, you can clip it and save it for another day, but I just want you to know that it is not going to be the same experience,” says Gwaltney.
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