How long did it take for you to develop your "nose"?

[ashauler]

Of course they all don't taste the same. If they did I wouldn't need so much damn humidor space.
I grew up in my grandmothers variety store. Mini-Mart to you young fellas. Back in those days we sold over 100 brands of cigarettes. Blind, I could identify many of them. Hey, I couldn't smoke them all. With cigars, if you were to give me a Dominican puro, Nic Puro, Honduran Puro (this one might be a problem) and a Cuban, I am reasonably certain I could identify which was which. But none of them would taste like essence of chocolate or sweet cocoa. They would taste like what they were, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Honduran, and Cuban tobacco. They are all quite distinctive to me. People should concentrate their efforts on being able to distinguish those attributes, the flavors that come from the soil, not getting frustrated by not being able to taste what those hacks at CA tell us we should taste.

Doc.

Why not try it in the Puro Pot Pass? Tell ya what, I'll add a 5'er to the prize pack if you play and win.

[nhcigarfan]

I can sometimes taste flavors but I attribute it more to the smoke/leaf combo triggering multiple taste bud types at the same time and in roughly the same quantity as the flavor it is mimicking. Like sweet and bitter along with a thicker smoke gives 'hints' of cocoa.

That's about as much thinking as I'm going to do on the subject.

[mrtr33]

Why not try it in the Puro Pot Pass? Tell ya what, I'll add a 5'er to the prize pack if you play and win.

Same here.

[Devil Doc]

Why not try it in the Puro Pot Pass? Tell ya what, I'll add a 5'er to the prize pack if you play and win.

Intriguing idea. I'd be willing to risk failure and embarrassment, but not under those circumstances and certainly not for five cigars.

I think it's interesting, and there must be some message there, that we've gone from me trying to help a newbie not feel inadequate because he doesn't taste food in his cigars to some getting up in arms about their belief system being challenged. It's a shame that there are very few pre-boom cigar smokers left in this world. I feel so alone and misunderstood.
I quite understand why CA invented a way, flawed as it may be, to review cigars. Those smokers who lived through the boom understand the damage they caused. The shortage of tobacco, the really bad tobacco and the outrageous prices they had to endure because of that publications avarice.The problem is that many new to the hobby don't realize that it's a literary device and end up feeling unworthy because all they taste is tobacco. Certainly, cigar reviews would be boring without associating what we taste in our cigars with food, but there has to be a better way. What that way is, I have no idea. I'm not a wordsmith. My metaphors and similes are amateurish but someone out there should be able to.

Doc.

[ashauler]

Intriguing idea. I'd be willing to risk failure and embarrassment, but not under those circumstances and certainly not for five cigars.

I think it's interesting, and there must be some message there, that we've gone from me trying to help a newbie not feel inadequate because he doesn't taste food in his cigars to some getting up in arms about their belief system being challenged. It's a shame that there are very few pre-boom cigar smokers left in this world. I feel so alone and misunderstood.
I quite understand why CA invented a way, flawed as it may be, to review cigars. Those smokers who lived through the boom understand the damage they caused. The shortage of tobacco, the really bad tobacco and the outrageous prices they had to endure because of that publications avarice.The problem is that many new to the hobby don't realize that it's a literary device and end up feeling unworthy because all they taste is tobacco. Certainly, cigar reviews would be boring without associating what we taste in our cigars with food, but there has to be a better way. What that way is, I have no idea. I'm not a wordsmith. My metaphors and similes are amateurish but someone out there should be able to.

Doc.

Well, the rules of the pot pass are pretty much set, the same for everyone. I'm not a rich man so 5 cigars is about the best I could add to the pot. I do have some pretty good cigars in the cooler though.

I don't think anyone here is extolling the virtues of the pompous and overblown reviews in CA...in fact, I think you'll find plenty of posts on here disparaging that rag. That being said, there is no getting around the fact that something common between the reviewer and the audience must be used to relate the experience of smoking a particular cigar. Since the "taste" of the smoke is the most important thing, at least to me, what else is there to use?

I know, nobody eats leather or wood.

ETA: I wasn't smoking cigars during the boom, but, trust me, I have lots of recent experience with the taste of poorly grown, badly fermented, horribly processed tobacco.

[Devil Doc]

ETA: I wasn't smoking cigars during the boom, but, trust me, I have lots of recent experience with the taste of poorly grown, badly fermented, horribly processed tobacco.

There's a start.

Doc.

[ashauler]

[/B]

There's a start.

Doc.

Ok, a start. Let's see if we can improve. I grew some tobacco that performed very well in the garden and produced a very nice leaf. I picked it too early, cured it improperly, and it dried with a greenish tint....not completely green, but you could see just a touch in the leaf. I was able to sweat out the green by using a mock flue cure process.

Here's how I would have reviewed it:

It was sickly sweet tasting, and reminded me of freshly mown grass. The aftertaste was bitter and lingering, and the aroma of the smoke was barely tolerable. The nasal exhale proved to be more a test of my man-hood than a method to get a better grasp of the flavor.

Better description than the "start"? Easier for a reader to identify with? To me yes, to others, maybe not.

[badwhale]

<snip>The nasal exhale proved to be more a test of my man-hood than a method to get a better grasp of the flavor.
<snip>

[ashauler]

Well, I passed, dammit.