About Cigar Profile

I started this website as a place to post straightforward, objective, and actionable cigar reviews. Let me explain what exactly that means.

Straightforward

There’s a terrible tendency for cigar reviews to be overly detailed and to tuck any overviews or general remarks away to the very bottom of the review. I’m somewhat of an impatient person and those sorts of reviews take far too long to read. Cigar Profile is a response to those types of websites.

It’s pretty infuriating to have to scroll through three pages of analysis and ten images just to discover that a cigar was rated 76. So, I put that information in the sidebar. I don’t want to have to trek through paragraph after paragraph to get to the basic facts of a cigar. So, I put that information in the sidebar. I don’t want to read pages of descriptions just to get a general sense of the flavors. So, I put that information in the sidebar.

I also try to put as good a summary in the beginning of the review as I can. I want readers to get the information they want with as little scrolling as possible. I understand, I’m busy! I don’t want to read five paragraphs when one would have sufficed. I break down the cigar after providing a brief overview, but if you don’t smoke cigars for the individual experience of each third, then by all means just read the overview!

Objective

I think a cigar review is only as valuable as it is reproducable. I’m not a super-taster, but if I was I don’t think it would be particularly useful to use that ability to pick out flavors that the average person wouldn’t detect. With a reproducable review, other people are able to easily identify the same flavors and aromas.

Obviously everything in the review can’t be objective. My idea of a good value cigar is probably different than yours. I might place a different value on construction than does somebody else. There are a few ways to tackle this problem. I could possibly develop a scoring rubric, stick to it, and share it, or I could address these biases as they come up.

I’m not a teacher, so I don’t want to plug numbers into a rubric. With a rubric, there’s an issue of sharing in a way that others would find it and read it. If I just make a webpage with the rubrik information, few readers will find it. If I put it in every review then the reviews will become difficult to follow.

I much prefer to address my biases as they come up. In the reviews I try to recount the smoking experience as dispassionately as possible. I try not to complain about the construction, I just take a picture of a wonky burn and state the number of times I had to fix it. You can decide for yourself whether or not it’s a big deal. I’ll let you know whether I think it’s a big deal, but the information is there for you to decide for yourself.

Actionable

I read cigar reviews so that I can figure out which cigars to buy. In my opinion, that is the main purpose of a cigar review – to enable the reader to make an informed purchase. I know which flavors I like and tend to buy cigars based on the flavors I’m craving at the moment. I know a lot of other people that make purchase decisions based on the same information, so I put the flavors in the sidebar where it’s immediately obvious whether the actual review is worth reading.

There is also a verdict section in each review. This is where I will explain why I rated the cigar the way I did and whether or not I would buy it again. My hope is that these sections provide enough context to inform the reader so they can decide whether or not they would like to buy the cigar.