CC Cigar Weight Inconsistency

[Wookie]

I don't weigh many of my sticks but when something seems off I like to throw a stick on the scale. Tonight I tossed a fat RyJ Churchill on the scale and the pig topped out at 20 grams. And it's smoking beautifully. Bonus. I think a Churchill is supposed to be 15.9 grams. I pullled a 2015 Esplendido the other day that barely hit 13 grams. Only lasted an hour and forty minutes. I bet this RyJ tonight will last 2.5 hours+. Anybody notice this sort of thing regularly? Maybe I will start weighing stuff more often if for nothing less than the novelty. 

[El Presidente]

30 minutes ago, Wookie said:

I don't weigh many of my sticks but when something seems off I like to throw a stick on the scale. Tonight I tossed a fat RyJ Churchill on the scale and the pig topped out at 20 grams. And it's smoking beautifully. Bonus. I think a Churchill is supposed to be 15.9 grams. I pullled a 2015 Esplendido the other day that barely hit 13 grams. Only lasted an hour and forty minutes. I bet this RyJ tonight will last 2.5 hours+. Anybody notice this sort of thing regularly? Maybe I will start weighing stuff more often if for nothing less than the novelty. 

"Cuban Cigar Inconsistency as a headline" is akin to "Politician Caught Telling a Lie"  

[El Presidente]

I have posted up some cracking photos in the past of dress boxes where there are some huge cigars next to anorexic ones.  Many times it looks like a cigar version of "mum, dad and the kids"

[Wookie]

I'm one hour 40 minutes into my 20 gram RyJ pig and not even halfway yet. Freaking glorious. BTW, where I'm from..politicians tend to be balanced and fair. Most civil to each other and each other's respective constituencies. ?

[Capt. Corona]

This begs the question............if the individual cigars in one box are all over kingdom.....what was used as a benchmark in the first place?

[El Presidente]

14 minutes ago, Capt. Corona said:

This begs the question............if the individual cigars in one box are all over kingdom.....what was used as a benchmark in the first place?

.......it's aspirational    

[Smokecigareveryday]

I have heard somewhere that Cuban rollers are paid by the weight. So the heavier the cigar the more you get paid? 

[El Presidente]

8 minutes ago, Smokecigareveryday said:

I have heard somewhere that Cuban rollers are paid by the weight. So the heavier the cigar the more you get paid? 

The first time that I have ever heard that 

[Wookie]

Dang... 3 hours and 20 minutes of old school RyJ Churchill goodness. 20 gram fat boy with a perfect draw. 

[NSXCIGAR]

6 hours ago, Wookie said:

Tonight I tossed a fat RyJ Churchill on the scale and the pig topped out at 20 grams.

Holy cow--that's unbelievable for a Julieta 2. The only factory vitola that weighs more than 20 grams is a Diademas. 

So you've got a Julieta 2 that weighs more than a Prominentes (DC) or Gran Coronas ("A")! 

5 hours ago, Capt. Corona said:

This begs the question............if the individual cigars in one box are all over kingdom.....what was used as a benchmark in the first place?

Probably just had some top rollers carefully roll a handful of each vitola and average them out. 

I don't know where the weights are published by HSA, however. @El Presidente used to list them on the old int'l store cart--did those just come from CCW? @ATGroom is showing the weight list last updated in 2013 so many newer vitolas are yet to be listed. What's the official source on the weights?

[El Presidente]

4 minutes ago, NSXCIGAR said:

I don't know where the weights are published by HSA, however. @El Presidente used to list them on the old int'l store cart--did those just come from CCW? @ATGroom is showing the weight list last updated in 2013 so many newer vitolas are yet to be listed. What's the official source on the weights?

The official source of weights is supplied by HSA. They haven't  changed. 

[NSXCIGAR]

Just now, El Presidente said:

The official source of weights is supplied by HSA. They haven't  changed. 

Is it publicly available and I just missed it or is it semi-confidential? Unlike Alex not to update since 2013 if the info is easily obtainable. 

[El Presidente]

Just now, NSXCIGAR said:

Is it publicly available and I just missed it or is it semi-confidential? Unlike Alex not to update since 2013 if the info is easily obtainable. 

It is supplied to all distributors. A necessity when it come to imports. 

[Notsocleaver]

I'd love to see an updated list with some of the newer vitolas.

[ATGroom]

7 hours ago, El Presidente said:

It is supplied to all distributors. A necessity when it come to imports. 

Any chance I could get a copy Rob? If so I'll update the list on CCW.

[El Presidente]

3 minutes ago, ATGroom said:

Any chance I could get a copy Rob? If so I'll update the list on CCW.

I will arrange to get an  up to date copy and forward it on + post it somewhere on FOH for reference. 

[Colt45]

30 minutes ago, El Presidente said:

I will arrange to get an  up to date copy and forward it on + post it somewhere on FOH for reference. 

Perhaps the ReFOHrence forum?  

ReFOHRence

[CaptainQuintero]

17 hours ago, Wookie said:

 BTW, where I'm from..politicians tend to be balanced and fair. Most civil to each other and each other's respective constituencies. ?

  Kashyyyk is a place we all dream about and aspire to be like 

[cigaraholic]

Rollers get paid by weight ?????? I would believe they get a bonus for under filling 

[Capt. Corona]

9 hours ago, El Presidente said:

I will arrange to get an  up to date copy and forward it on + post it somewhere on FOH for reference. 

Please advise when this happens.

[ATGroom]

A little while ago I was thinking about building a tax calculator type feature into CCW, where you could select a bunch of different cigars, put in your tax rate per kg, and then it would estimate the tax based on the weights.

As a precursor to that I considered adding the official weight on the cigar lists next to the ring and length. I imagine that even when Rob supplies an updated official weight list, it probably won't include all vitolas, ie, not the one off ones from various special release humidors etc, so for them I was going to use the official weights to figure out a formula for calculating a weight of the vitolas I didn't have. In theory it should be easy - for two cigars of the same ring gauge, you can figure out the tobacco per mm, and then just add or subtract that and you should get the weight of the longer or shorter cigar. For two cigars of the same length but different ring, you should be able to figure out a % increase per ring point.

When I tried to do the actual numbers though, it quickly became clear that the official weights don't make sense that way. They don't reflect consistent proportional increases for size.

Which says to me that when Habanos did their official weights list, they didn't pick an "perfect" example stored under "ideal" conditions or anything like that. They just put the first cigar to hand on a scale. Maybe they did an average of four or five. I doubt it was more. Some official weights are probably below the real average for the size, and some above it.

Within a single box you can see up to a 30% difference in weight between cigars. If you took two cigars that weighed the same and stored them under different conditions for a while before weighing again, you would see significantly different weights based on moisture content.

So, all in all, I decided that as the official weights really have little to no bearing on what the real cigars weigh, it wasn't worth listing front and centre on CCW. Would be happy to reconsider though if this is something people would find valuable.

[medzikone]

1 hour ago, ATGroom said:

n theory it should be easy - for two cigars of the same ring gauge, you can figure out the tobacco per mm, and then just add or subtract that and you should get the weight of the longer or shorter cigar. For two cigars of the same length but different ring, you should be able to figure out a % increase per ring point.

Marevas

8.46

42

129

Petit Corona

Petit Coronas

7.70

42

129

Petit Corona

From CCW.

[ATGroom]

54 minutes ago, medzikone said:

Marevas

8.46

42

129

Petit Corona

Petit Coronas

7.70

42

129

Petit Corona

From CCW.

Yeah... case in point...

This one was discussed in another thread recently. At one time, Marevas was handmade, and Petit Coronas was machine-made... since the early 2000s both have been handmade and are functionally identical. That Habanos keeps using the different names in their catalogues etc is an artefact of history.

So there is no reason for these to be different... the fact that they are gives you an idea of how accurate the official list is.

Given that the official list is used for tax purposes, and the tax man presumably takes it at face value, the real shame is that HSA didn't systematically bump them all down by 15% or so.?

[ATGroom]

For anyone interested, I have updated CCW's weight list with the latest PCC list provided by Rob. Where the PCC list contradicts itself (ie, two cigars of the same factory size with different weights, or in one case two identical cigars in different packaging with different weights), I have made a call based on what seemed logical. The PCC list doesn't include anything discontinued before about 2015, however, some 1970s dealer's catalogues do include weights, so from those I was able to fill in a lot of blanks.

Using those two sources, I was about to get a weight for 166 out of 205 named factory violas (and quite a few for which the name is not known).

The remainder are mainly either long discontinued or obscure special release sizes like the original Behike size, or the Grandiosos from the Cohiba 50th Anniversary humidor. For these, I have taken an average of the weight per mm for other cigars of the same ring and same type (ie, perfecto or straight), and multiplied it out. In the case of Grandiosos, because there are no other 60rg straight cigars to base the estimate on, I have just put "unknown."

https://www.cubancigarwebsite.com/cigar/officialweights

 

I haven't included these weights next to each cigar on the main CCW pages, because as discussed above... the official weights are pretty meaningless. It would be trivial for me to add them though if it's something people would like.

The one practical application for having a weight database that I can think of is to allow people to quickly estimate how much tax they're going to get stung for when bringing in tobacco... so I built this calculator.

https://www.cubancigarwebsite.com/cigar/taxcalculator

 

It's set up for the Aussie tax system, because that's the one I am familiar with, although you can change all the numbers so it should work for anywhere that uses a $/kg calculation. If your country has a tax system that uses something different that could still be calculated from the number of cigars and the weight, feel free to message me and I'll look at adding it.

Thanks Rob for providing the list.