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Tunneling on most sticks!
cryptoking13
Posts: 8 ✭
Most of my sticks have been suffering from tunneling, mainly the ones with oily wrappers such as maduros. Connecticuts dont seem to have it as bad, but they do tunnel too. It seems as the filler is dry and some outer leaves are wet, I have lowered the humidity from 70 to 62-65 in the past month because they just wouldn't light at all or the burn would die very fast. I have tried both smoking fast and slow, but fast makes it tunnel and slow the cherry just dies out quick. Has any one gone through this?
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Tunneling is usually blamed on smoking too quickly, you may want to look at pacing yourself. That last photo with the pinhole tunnel looks to me like more of a construction issue with the cigar than user error, though.
Try leaving a cigar out in the environment where you’ll be smoking for an hour or so ahead of time if you can. I’ve found that most burn issues can be fixed or at least helped by letting your cigar acclimate to the smoking conditions.
How long has this been a problem?
How long have you been smoking cigars?
Don't take this as me belittling you but I'm guessing it's your lighting technique. Years back, I watched a video by Nick Perdomo and adopted his method. Everyone has their own preference, but it has worked well for me. Take a single flame torch, hold it at an angle, and without touching the flame to the cigar, run the torch around the outer edge of the cigar. This 'welds' the wrapper and binder together. Once that's done and you can see a glowing ring, you can proceed to light the filler.
No he didn't @cryptoking13 ↑. That video was in the @ScotchnSmoke episode, which was brought to us by the number 2 and the letters GTFO. (A joke against a guy that's not you, @cryptoking13 )
I once read that 98 percent of all tunnelling issues are construction-induced, and I totally buy into that notion. We could look at the other 2 percent though.
Sometimes smoking too fast can cause your filler to burn hot and fast, but from my personal experience, this is only true when the wrapper and binder are overly moist AND your filler is way less humidified (often I've found that this is also true ONLY when cigars are underfilled/loosely packed). This can occur if you bought too-dry cigars and didn't rest them in your humidor long enough, where the wrapper got moist but humidity didn't work it's way into the filler tobaccos.
Typically smoking too fast will produce a coned cherry (sorta looks like a pencil tip). However, if your binder tobacco is too thick or your wrapper is too wet, is smoking fast will exacerbate construction problems that may otherwise not cause tunneling.
My 2% of tunneling where it is not the fault of the construction of the cigar is usually because I smoke it too slowly. The filler tobacco is that are on fire are the hottest because they are the most bunched together. Sometimes when I go too long in between drawing, the the wrapper leaf will go out but they're still enough heat in the filler to keep the little cherry alive.