Last 3rd of Cigar gets bland

[Wilzc]

It has been a frequent occasion for me where the last third of the cigars I smoke tend to be bland, with a tannic mouthfeel that lingers on the tongue.

I wonder if this is due to the cigars being young?

Or overhumidifaction? (I keep at 63-65rH, 27-29 deg celsius)

 

Or perhaps the environment in which I smoke them is too humid and therefore moisture gathers at the end of the stick

 

[heftytome]

I have the reverse problem as of late. Cigars get quite bitter, but I believe my cigars maybe over-humidified at this point given our weather fluctuations in Massachusetts. 

[JoeyGunz]

Have you tried purging the cigar?

[shlomo]

That's a lot of water in 27 degree air. I would have guessed bitter as well. Maybe your taste buds are getting scorched bc of the high heat..lol

[Colt45]

For me this is not unusual - I can't recall many cigars remaining truly flavorful down to the end. I simplistically attribute it to the prolonged burning, tar build up, etc, that comes with smoking.

[cigaraholic]

Probably a little to young.....a little to wet....and smoking to fast...

[madandana]

6 hours ago, shlomo said:

That's a lot of water in 27 degree air. I would have guessed bitter as well. Maybe your taste buds are getting scorched bc of the high heat..lol

Shlomo's right look at Rays moisture chart. Your on the high end of the scale.

 

[Dave O)))]

Shlomo's right look at Rays moisture chart. Your on the high end of the scale.

 

Something strange happened to my edit, so I'll try again:

I read this differently, it looks to be bang on the sweet spot at 12% moisture content. +27° is quite warm and according to the theory, relatively dry.

[mention=79]Pigfish[/mention] what do you make of this?

 

 

[Dave O)))]

Tapatalk is playing silly buggers with my edits, but you get the picture. Sorry for any confusion.

[Wilzc]

Indeed,

 

 

At 26-29degs, or roughly around 80F, I'm keeping them at 63-65% RH, which should keep my cigars at roughly around 12PMC

 

In any case, I'm gonna lower it down to 61-63% and let them all sit a little drier for a few months

 

 

 

 

[Fugu]

Not very likely to be a case of over-humidification from storage here. Dave O is interpreting the chart correctly, you are on the dryer end of the spectrum. This is not about absolute humidity of the air, it is about moisture content of the tobacco!

But the chart is not to be over-interpreted with regard to the exact tobacco moisture (or PMC as Piggy @PigFish puts it). I have been debating this with Piggy before, the scaling of his chart (the - sort of - log-scaling of the ordinate) is off and inconsistent to a degree. And we are not even dealing with cigar tobacco here. So, this all has to be taken with a grain of salt (as the man himself never tires to stress). What is clear from it, however, is that for a given storage rH, with higher temperature tobacco moisture PMC will go down (dryer cigars).

[Wilzc]

Urgh oh ah...

Time to kick it up to 75!

[Fugu]

2 hours ago, Wilzc said:

Time to kick it up to 75!

"on the dryer end" not saying on the overly dry end....

[NSXCIGAR]

My conclusion over the years is that this is as much due to the quality of the cigar as any other factor.

Bland spots at any point in the cigar are and have been extremely common for me over the last 20 years. Most frequently it seems to occur in the first third into the second third but also happens quite a bit in the last third. In fact, I would say this phenomenon is the main one in terms how I score cigars. 

I've smoked a wide variety of cigars stored in the exact same well-controlled environment for many years (3+) and found wide variation in this phenomenon with the only pattern being the model of cigar in question and the box that the cigars come from, meaning this has always appeared to me to be a quality issue, not a storage issue mainly. Not that sub-optimal storage conditions can't result in such phenomena but when that's taken out of the equation and the problem still occurs regularly I think it's safe to say this can be discounted for the most part. 

[earthson]

While impossible to tell whether it's a one-off when it does happen, I've always assumed it was due to youth.

It reminds me of a related phenomenon, wherein a cigar I know to be too young will be dropdead amazing for the first inch before falling into ammonia, tannins and acrid youth.  I've always assumed that this occurs because the open end of the cigar is curing and drying at a faster rate than the closed-in filler near the head.