You Need to NOSE

You should enjoy a premium cigar with all your senses! OK, well maybe not your hearing, but certainly looking it over closely with your eyes, feeling the texture and firmness with your fingers and analyzing the taste are an obvious part of the enjoyment.

In addition to that, your sense of smell is of course involved in the smoking process, but I want you to try to engage your sense of smell before you ever light up. Make yourself NOSE the cigar.

Simply unwrap the stick, remove the labels and put it under your nostrils and breath in. What do you smell? Force yourself to come up with at least one or two descriptive words. You may have to give it some thought and get creative, but I really encourage you to give it a try. You will be surprised as you develop your ability to recognize some subtle and not so subtle differences in the aroma of the stick.

Barnyard or stable floor seem to be my most likely first impression [and I mean those in an absolutely positive way, those are both positives for me!]

You may even occasionally get a bit of an underlying hint of something like a spice or a citrus aroma.

It is also interesting, once you have come up with your word or word for the stick, to nose the very end of the stick so that you get an aroma from the filler and binder, not just the wrapper. You will usually notice a marked difference.

JUST GIVE IT A TRY AND SEE WHAT YOU THINK!

I also like to get a second nose from my very creative wife. Leather, sometimes specifically saddle leather is one of her favorites. She often gets what she just describes as Richness.

GO FOR IT!