Is is necessarry to age NC's?

[Hammerhead]

Originally Posted by singlguy9

using the same box is critical to ensure flavor consistency and age of the cigar at the start of the experiment.

Nah. I don't think it needs to be that complicated. Sure there are some variances in flavor from one crop 'vintage' to another, but that might well be a good thing, in that the conclusions we draw would reflect product from a wider cross-section of harvesting seasons. Again, this isn't intended to be a precise laboratory experiment, so much as a 'guideline'. I think we already have much 'secondary data' out there to be had by way of the existing experience of many of our LLG's that can be shared. The point is that if we see a pattern developing - for the sake of illustration - where an AF Hemingway is killer when aged at a minimum of 16 months, it saves us from prematurely smoking 8 cigars over the span of every other month to 'guess' at whether or not they're ready.

Originally Posted by KnightKrusher

Sounds like a good idea,what would you need from those that would be willing to help.

I figure we'd need at least a dozen or two experienced LLGs who have broad and/or deep collections that can supply experiential observations. I'd also need some help programming the database (MS Access) and figuring out how to extend it to web. What I see happening is that there will be a bell curve that will form around two data points - the most popular cigars will have the most data point counts, and in any given cigar, as I said above, there will be a consensus for those cigars that I think will turn out to be +/-6 months of each other.

Originally Posted by palm55

Excellent point on how long they've lived in the tobacconist's humidor!

Most boxes are stamped with a production date. For instance, I know that ERDM N/C's have a month/year on the bottom. Each user contributing data would have to factor that into their input as well as they're able. Again, keeping in mind that we're talking about aging times measured often in 2 - 3 years, that's 24 - 36 months. So if you're off by a couple months either way, it's not the end of the world, and you also have the benfit of other contributors helping to smooth out the data.

So, I think we'd need at least 24 experienced users offering input. The question is how best to collect and analyze the data. I was thinking of Excel, but it's 'flat' presentation might get confusing because of all the variations in cigars. Perhaps Access is better for this, because we can accommodate variations within any given model of cigar. For instance, there's no such thing as "just" a simple AF 858 - that model is produced with 5 different wrappers - Claro, Natural, Maduro, SunGrown and Rosado. I think that if we had a way to be able to select a drop-downs for the below fields, it would be a minimum data set. But if anyone can think of other fields, let me know.

User Name
Brand
Model
Wrapper
Min.Agetime

The question for me is whether or not I can get Access to work over the web, and restrict it to only authorized users here at CS. I guess I'll work on that tonight, maybe, and will post back here when I have something worthwhile.

If any of you guys are Access experts, hit me with a PM, and let's see where this hare-brained idea takes us.