First humidor - Help and Advice Welcome
CalvinAndHobo
Posts: 3,135 ✭✭✭✭✭
in Cigar 101
Alright, I'm super excited. Here we go. 
5
Comments
Here's the inside. those thing in the middle of the shelves facing sideways (for instance, right above the circular hygrometer, and in between the circular and lower rectangular hygrometers.) are spanish cedar pen blanks, 10 for $10 on amazon. great way to separate singles.
Next I wiped it down with one of those seasoning wipes. It's a 600 count, so I bought 4 black ice 8oz beads. I'm going to put my bovedas right on top of them.
distilled water in the bowls. Now I wait and wipe it down again tomorrow.
1. Patience
2. Weatherstripping for the door seal, but check it after seasoning. The wood will swell a bit, and you may not need it.
3. Bovedas on the shelves, not on top of the black ice. They will "fight" each other to regulate the rh.
4. Don't be **** about the rh, calibrate the hygrometers, and one high and one near the bottom are more than enough.
5. Find a place in your home where the temp is relatively stable, and under 70. It is a shame to hide a beautiful humidor in a closet, but that may be the best place to keep temperature consistent.
6.More patience!
Enjoy!
the hygrometers are all calibrated, I just took those pictures right after putting them in and having them in various places.
I've got a place set aside for it, away from windows and heaters/ac.
I know about the patience part but ugh lol. I was ready to start putting everything in there right away.
I've heard that I should let the rh get to 80 before it can be considered seasoned. I'm going to make sure it stays above 80 for a few days, while also looking into how much time machines cost.
Brett
Nice score for sure!!!!
That's true and I feel the same way. I find that when I smoke them at 70+, I also have burn issues with one side burning faster than the other. Part of that is most definitely due to me being a newish smoker and therefore smoking them too quickly, but also because of the moisture in the half of the cigar that was touching either wood or other cigars, as opposed to air. I have much fewer issues when smoking a cigar in the 60-65 range. My plan for this humidor is to use it as long term storage. I plan to use either my cooler, or a mason jar, as the humidor that I open all the time to smoke from, while filling it up once every few weeks when it runs low. I don't like having to get up all the time to get a new cigar because I'm lazy, and I also smoke enough to the point where the humidity levels in the cooler would probably resemble this (WWWWWW) over the course of one of my days off. I want this new humidor to be able to hold a cigar for years in perfect condition, without risking anything. I'm probably going to have some 65 rh bovedas in the cooler/jar, and the black ice 70rh one way humidity tubs in the aging humidor, with some 72 rh bovedas on the shelves to keep things from getting out of hand. At least that's the plan for now, unless I learn something else.
Brett
I spent 2 hours trying to pick up the squishy escape artists thingys off the sink and floor (I was having visions of X-Files). Only use the closed round ones now.
I've wiped it down 3 times earlier this week and it has been holding at 78 for the past three days. I think it's good but if it's not I'll just put everything back in the cooler and let it season longer.
It might be, we'll see. And yeah the wipes are these completely unnecessary things that were included with a digital hygrometer and 16 oz bottle of juice that I won for like $12 on an auction site. You wipe down every surface of wood in the humidor every 12 hours or so with them. It just speeds up the time it takes to get the wood seasoned. It seemed to work, the past 3 days when I checked it was 78, 79, and 79 today with just the bowls of water in there. I don't know that I'm right though about it not being too soon. I might be being impatient. It won't be too hard to dump everything back into the cooler and season it more though if I need.