How to season and use a cigar humidor.

Your new cigar humidor will be bone dry when you first receive it. Our first instinct will be to test the seal by lifting the lid 3 or 4 inches and letting it drop.  A good seal will produce a soft thud sound. This is due to the air cushion that a tight fitting lid will produce as it free falls.  A bad seal will allow air to escape from all sides and the lid will slam closed with a sharp crack of the lid striking the body.  But now is not the time to test this.  As I said, the humidor is bone dry and is not in an operation condition. Seasoning the wood will cause the wooden pieces that make the seal expand a little, and a loose seal will usually self correct after moisture is introduced

Seasoning your humidor is a two day job. The tools you will need are a clean spray bottle and distilled water. Some folks will tell you to wet a towel with water, distilled or not, and start wiping the inside of your humidor. I prefer not to use this method because it increases actual contact with things that might be carrying mold spores.  Just run your “clean” towels under one of those germ finding black lights and then tell me I’m paranoid.

Fill the spray bottle with distilled water and lightly mist the interior; dividers, shelves, and all.  Be careful that you do not overspray, we don’t want a puddle to form. If you do overspray and a puddle does form, dump the water out rather than blot it with a towel.  Remember, we don’t like towels.  Let this stand for a few hours and then lightly spray the interior once again. Let this stand overnight.  The humidity level should max out on the hygrometer and then slowly start to settle down over the course of 24 to 48 hours and rest somewhere in the 70% range.

                Tip:  When seasoning a new humidor, do not let the lid close all the way.  The wooden seal will initially expand quite a lot and will jam the lid closed by pressing tightly against the box. The only way to open a humidor with a lid that has jammed shut is to pry it open with a knife.  And that never ends well for a nice shiny new humidor.

So that we can monitor the progress of our seasoning humidor, we will need a correctly calibrated hygrometer.  Not all hygrometers are adjustable, so be sure that the humidor you buy comes with an adjustable hygrometer.  Otherwise, you will never really know if your humidor is working properly or not.  You will know if your analog hygrometer (the kind with a dial and a needle) is adjustable if there is a hole in the back center with a slot visible through the hole.  More in this later.

To calibrate your hygrometer you will need: A zip lock bag, small bottle cap, table salt, a few drops of water, and a small flathead screwdriver.

 Fill the bottle cap 2/3 with table salt and apply two or three drops of water to make a moist paste.  Place the mixture along with the hygrometer into the zip lock bag and seal it shut.  This salt and water mixture will always produce an interior humidity level of 75%. I’m not sure why but it is always the case and provides a reliable benchmark by which we can calibrate our hygrometer.

 Let this sit overnight or throughout the day.  If the hygrometer is already calibrated it will read 75%.  But chances are it is not calibrated and you will need to adjust it.  This is where the slot in the back comes in. You will need to act quickly because from the moment you remove the hygrometer from the 75% humidity bag the reading will start to drop. Place the flathead screwdriver into the slot and turn slightly to move the needle to the 75% mark. That’s it, your hygrometer is now calibrated.

                A note about digital hygrometers:  Frankly, I don’t trust them.  I took a dozen digital hygrometers and did this salt calibration test to all of them at the same time.  The results were all over the board and the distance from the lowest reading to the highest reading was 10 percentage points.  Only use a digital hygrometer that is adjustable.