It is not very often that we receive a kind of sour and tasteless experience while smoking. An instant thought that disturbs us is whether we bought bad cigars? Or was the cuban cigar shop from where we bought the tobacco not good? Sometimes that's not the case. Perhaps, it is ammonia. It usually gets removed before the tobacco leaves undergo the aging process and later the rolling process. The procedure which removes ammonia from the tobacco leaves is fermentation. Let's see it in detail.
Curing
Once the plantations are ready to be harvested, the mature leaves are plucked and later tied together carried inside a building. Picking tobacco leaves is also termed as priming. There every bunch is hung consecutively using strings. This will reduce the moisture inside the leaves. The colour of the leaves turn from green to yellow and then finally to dark brown. A constant temperature is maintained in the curing barn between 70% to 76%, usually it takes about five to six weeks for the leaves to reach the desired stage. Next, they go through two or three other stages where they clean off all the unwanted impurities and toxins.
First Stage
Have you imagined why the Punch Punch Cigars and the Nording Tumbleweed Tobacco smoked are soft on touch yet yield different taste while smoking? Besides, being cured, the leaves are moved in a bunch of five or more into what is known as gavillas. These are arranged in small piles called the pilones. The thermometer is then inserted in the middle through a pipe to produce heat. Here different types of tobacco leaves are passed through temperature adjustments to deliver various tastes. Next, once the temperature reaches 35°C, all gavillas get shaken off excess moisture to cool them and then re-arranged. This process continued for almost a month. An interesting fact about this stage is : after a month, the leaves are unassembled and categorized into different sections that decide if the particular leaf will be used as a wrapper, binder or filler. Additionally, it is also decided to move aside tobacco to be shredded for hand rolling or loose pipe tobacco to be packed in tins or pouches individually. Now, they move wrapper leaves aside, stripping stems off the binder and filler leaves piling them both separately into two separate piles for the second stage.
Second Stage
This time, the classified leaf piles are six to seven feet tall called the burros. These burros are repeatedly humidified, to accelerate the fermentation process by shuffling and rearranging for a duration of exactly 2 months. The completion of this step indicates the effect of flavours that get stimulated and the amount of aroma for both cigars and tobacco. Some of the aromatic tobacco is Erinmore mixture and Gold block which are mildly aromatic while Peterson's connoisseur's choice, Brookfield no.1, and Borkum riff ruby pipe tobacco are the highly aromatic ones. In cigars Ramon Allones small club and Guantanamera puritos cigars high in aroma while Juan Lopez Seleccion No.2 and Romeo y Julieta Wide Churchill Cigars box are mildly aromatic with a pleasant smoke. By chance if you are to visit a tobacco or cigar factory, you can visit this fermenting room to encounter the strong scent of ammonia that gets released throughout this stage. The fermenting and outcome differ according to the leaves that are getting fermented. It means the ligero, viso, seco, and volado leaves picked from different parts of the tobacco plantations. The top most part containing the newly born along with flowerings are called the ligero which takes the longest. Leaves that are very soft, not fully mature yet that are seen just below the ligero are the Viso leaves. Next comes the seco leaves and the bottom most are the Volados. The temperature is kept between 40°C to 60°C, leaves are inspected closely and reshuffled so that the temperature does not rise above 60 to avoid burning the leaves.
Third and final stage
Tobacco leaves are piled inside a barrel and exposed to a low temperature and later on removed, packed in bales and stacked in a room to be aged. The idea was to bring about a distinct but delicate flavour to the cigars. These were none other than the Cohiba cuban cigars. The result was exquisite, to be used for those special leaves to deliver a rich flavour and aromatic smoke that required this treatment. Significantly, every cigar manufacturer's fermentation procedure is not the same as every cook's cuisine recipe is not the same. Thus, the different taste palettes. Cigar masters too like the expert cooks carry out experiments to introduce new blends of tobacco and cigarillos to the markets. There are more than sixty-five cigars brand in the cigar industry. Most of the famed ones are desired and smoked worldwide by cigar lovers and experts. As we discuss, there must be many torcedors out there toiling away eagerly to introduce the latest addition of cigar and tobacco.