Cigar Reviewing - Detecting Flavors

[3x5card]

One of the great satisfactions of cigar smoking is tapping into the sensual, sensory pleasures that the burning leaf provides. As we become more experienced, our ability to discern aroma and flavor notes that are reminiscent of other things can become more acute and enhance our enjoyment of the experience. Cultivating this skill requires three essential elements:

1) The actual experience of the original sensory stimuli
"my mom used to make chocolate-sweet milk brownies when I was growing up"

2) A representation of that original experience in olfactory (smell) memory
"it was a rich cocoa aroma, with a milkiness from the sweetened condensed milk"

3) Focused and effortful practice in letting the experience of the cigar trigger connections in our olfactory sensory memory
"in my first PAM64, I caught a hint of something sweet, by my fifth, it really started to remind me of mom's chocolate sweet-milk brownies"

So, the first key point is that you actually had to have had a sensory experience that you then call up to associate with something you detect while smoking a cigar. The second key point is that aside from certain very strong and clear connections, this is a skill that improves with practice.

An additional complication is that from the sensory sciences, we've learned that people fall into three broad categories with regard to flavor detecting ability. Super tasters have the greatest ability, average tasters are about in the middle and non-tasters tend to detect fewer flavors or only the strongest ones. The primary difference between these three categories is in the density of taste buds on the tongue, however, there is also evidence that super tasters' sensitivities extend beyond the taste buds to subtle differences in brain chemistry and structure. Also, importantly, not only do people have different taste-abilities, but the same mixture of complex scent molecules can be perceived differently and trigger different associations. My cinnamon bun may be your graham cracker.

Here are a few links to interesting articles on tasting.
A great article about tasting and super tasters, with pictures
An interesting article about how our sense of taste can be fooled by other perceptions
An article that lends credence to the technique of blowing a little smoke out your nose to access more flavor notes
A moderately technical description of the neural process of tasting
A short article on bitter tastes and super tasters

So what does this have to do with smoking cigars? Well, when I was starting out, I would read the range of reviews out there and one type would always cause me to wonder whether I was getting everything I could out of a cigar. I'd read them and begin to doubt my own experiences. Anxiety about grabbing every flavor reference I could find would sometimes interfere with the enjoyment...and as we all know, that's just wrong. I call these "esoteric" reviews. They are typically written in flowery prose and include copious amounts of highly specific and uncommon descriptors.

But, if we understand that 1) people naturally have varying levels of tasting ability, 2) we each can perceive and associate scents differently and 3) linking flavor notes to scent memories is a skill that can be improved with practice, then we can see these reviews and our own capabilities in a whole new light. We can be comfortable enjoying our individual experience of smoking the cigar.

Just for curiosity's sake, I carried out a quick word analysis of a recent cigar review written by an established member of an online forum. I extracted the descriptor words (descriptive nouns, adjectives and adverbs) and counted them and compared that count to the total word count. In the case of this review, selected at random, fully 52% of all the words were descriptors. Now I want to make clear that I did not single out this person's work to subject it to ridicule. It is simply his style and way of describing his experience. I want to show an extreme example of the esoteric style to see if there's anything we can learn and use in our own accounts.

Wilkey

Total Descriptors, approximate: 202

Color (24)
Colorado Claro
deep cocoa
Van Dyke brown
burnt sienna cast
straw gold highlighting, around veins
single dark olive water mark, at mid-ship
ochre-tinged sienna
natural walnut
khaki
cocoa
Van Dyke brown
rich umber, imbued with...
pronounced sanguine tone

Physical Characteristics (22)
relatively silky outer leaf
minimal veining
quite similar
very fine tooth
very mild box press
relatively compact roll density, translated to...
medium medium-firm finger feel
good superficial resilience
nicely rendered taper, diminished to...
well-crafted point
exemplary build

Ash & Burn (20)
slightly flaky, chasmal, light to naval grey exterior of ash
more solid dark charcoal interior
cautiously disengaged the ash
variously rounded, blunted, conical, filigree embering tip
burn edge tended to unevenness
pre-light draw

Aroma and On the Palate (11
archetypal primary VVV fragrance of...
sweet clay earth
cocoa, lightly dusted by
hint of peanuts, embellished by
saddle leather
toffee
faint cedar
cedar, much more forthright
woodiness, bound to
smooth core Cuban leaf
peripheral sensations of...
bitter greens
bell peppers
lime zest
jalapeño, demure hit of
cigar lounge
ripe tobacco
antique furniture and leather upholstery, scents of
sumptuous
discreet sweetness. leaned to
smoke-dried apricots and cherries, evocative of
roasted cocktail nuts
rounded, medium bodied, sagely toasted tobacco
barn hay
calcareous soil striated with rock salt
cedar
white pepper
roasted peanuts and Arabica coffee, subtle overlay of
dried herbs, softly conveyed
zesty vegetal and cedar notes, echoed
simultaneously light and mouth-filling effect
earth-infused tobacco, to the fore
sweet meat quality
surprising
very round
amiable
somewhat remiscent
peak
nuts and coffee, slowly melded into the mix
textural quality, further smoothed by...
veneer of leather
homogeneous whole, amalgamated into
core tastes, never corroded by...
herbal, peppery spices
floral nuances, peeked through
bitterness
Medium to medium-full bodied at the close
Less piquant perkiness and spark
young
superior integration of...
wide-ranging constituent taste aspects

General (1
quite similar
overall appearance
recent production
higher standard
regular production vitola
superb
summer afternoon cigar
early stage
ideal
Eminently satisfying
well-blended characteristics...
emerged and fused
barely 5 month old
carefully matured tobaccos

*************
Note: I wasn't exactly sure if this should go in the Habanos or Non-Habanos Reviews forum but there seem to be more threads in this one. Mods, feel free to move it to the most appropriate forum.

Wilkey

[Bluenote]

Great read. Thanks for posting it here.

[joed]

Terrific post - very enlightening - I've often struggled to get that hint of vanilla or cocoa. It usually just tastes like a real good cigar to me!

[3x5card]

Originally Posted by joed

Terrific post - very enlightening - I've often struggled to get that hint of vanilla or cocoa. It usually just tastes like a real good cigar to me!

Roger that, joed. For me the dominant taste, by far, is always tobacco. I just can't get pull out such delicate flavor notes. And now, I don't really stress if I don't. After all, the leaf is what we're after, ain't it?

[Dr. Stogie Fresh]

Well done, and very enlightening. This should be a Sticky, if anything.

Also, if you want to conduct some research, I volunteer myself as a lab rat, especially if you buy the stogies. Oh, okay, I'll do it even if you don't.

The Doc

[puffmtd]

Thank you! Excellent post and very informative. Now I don't feel quite so guilty for just being able to tell when I think a cigar tastes good.

[Aaron]

This is a GREAT thread.

I once worked as a programmer for 6 years for a museum on a project called the Art and Architecture Thesaurus whose aim was to document and categorize pretty much every descriptive thing that could be said about objects of art.

Increasing one's vocabulary is beneficial to the novice and expert alike, helping to provide more accurate ways to convey details beyond the generalizations like "strong" or "woody".

What KIND of wood? Cedar? Oak? Redwood? These have VERY distinct characteristics and smells that translate into taste. You get my drift.

Is this thread the germ for a structured Cigar Flavors Thesaurus Wiki? Has it been done? If so, gimme a URL. If not, it'd be a great resource for us BOTLs!

Dr. Stogie suggests that this might be properly turned into a Sticky, effectively A Stick Flavor Sticky Wiki???

[Alpedhuez55]

I had a weird taste experience drinking a flavored tea once. The Flavor of a Celestial Seasonings Maple Vanilla tea made me think of college. When I looked at the ingredients, one of them was Malted Barley. THis scent came through strongly for me. My college was about a mile from a Bud Brewery and when the winds blew the right way, we would get the sweet smell of the boiling wort.

[colgate]

Let me try this out.

Og like pronounced sanguine tone in cigar Og smoke. Remind Og of calcareous soil striated with rock salt Og taste when pinned down by Uh in fight over Mmm.

/I'll have the roast duck with mango salsa

[Ivory Tower]

I have a better chance of discerning flavors if I blow a little smoke through my nose. Now, if I could only remember those initial sense experiences to reference. Great post and I'll refer to it before my next (first) review. (imagine + RG here)

[3x5card]

puffmtd,
Absolutely you should never feel guilty about smoking a cigar and enjoying it. It doesn't matter a what level you do, as long as you do. Sometimes I "taste" with the intent of intellectually understanding the cigar's characteristics and other times I just "enjoy" my cigar. Funny, sometimes starting out on one road, I end up on the other.

alpedheuz55,
Your experience is not at all unusual. Olfactory memories reside in one of the most "primitive" or primal areas of the human brain. And it is the fact that early experiences during the formative periods of childhood allow us to encode memories deeply in sense memory that makes these recollections as fresh at 66 years of age as they were at 6 years. Think about it; scents of home, memories of family, the pains and joys of figuring out the world are some of the things that make us who we are. In fact, any repeated or significant pairing between sensory stimuli and memory function can set up these lifelong triggers.

Aaron,
You bring up an excellent point about the vocabulary of description. A habit that's relevant to the enjoyment of cigars is the practice of recording notes. It is so very important if one is interested in 1) tracing the development of one's skills, 2) establishing a tasting history with a given cigar and 3) building an active and accessible descriptive vocabulary. Human memory is both malleable and fallible while a tasting journal is a permanent record of our experiences.

But also keep in mind that while the same scent molecule may trigger the same cascade of events in the olfactory apparatus, once these signals get into the brain, our decoding and interpretation of these might lead to quite different "flavors." In other words, my cinnamon toast might be your graham cracker.

Colgate,
LMAO!

IvoryTower,
I do occasionally blow from back to front as well. Generally, I prefer to blow back out my mouth and sniff that way. While this might get a little smoke in the lungs, it's more natural for me.

Wilkey

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by 3x5card

puffmtd,
But also keep in mind that while the same scent molecule may trigger the same cascade of events in the olfactory apparatus, once these signals get into the brain, our decoding and interpretation of these might lead to quite different "flavors." In other words, my cinnamon toast might be your graham cracker.

Which is the only POSSIBLE explanation for John Lennon marrying Yoko Ono.

A little too much "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" must have messed with his "apparatus", as you call it. Big time.

I'd have told her to get the olfactory out of there! Pronto.

[vtdragon]

Great post!
You have hit upon one of the most frustrating things for a newbie like me. That is, adequately describing the flavors of the cigars I smoke. Like many, I have been keeping a little notebook where I keep track of my likes and dislikes of the various cigars I have tried. One of my entries is always flavor. I perpetually struggle with what to put there as most often my perception is that the cigar tastes like tobacco. Now that is not to say I don't detect sweetness, bitterness or differentiate between a mild, medium or strong cigar but that elusive catagory of flavor continues to dodge my attempts at description. One thing I will say is that in looking back at my own reviews the cigars I rate the highest tend to have similar tastes. FYI these are RjY's, Upmanns, Matequilla's, Baccarrats and Cohiba's. As you may note, I favor the milder smokes, maybe that is part of the reason I am not discerning tastes like some others.

[MikeP]

Good post.

I generally don't blow smoke out my nose, although I understand it is supposed to be a means of aiding in your detection of flavors. I will sometimes blow smoke out the mouth and inhale in the nose (the so-called French inhale) but I try not to do this too much. That is a sure fire way for the cigar to go straight to my head if I'm not careful. Also, I find that the smoke can sometimes be harsh.

I have found that, for me, an excellent way to detect the subtle flavors of the cigar is while I'm drawing the smoke into my mouth to also be inhaling through the nose or just smelling at that point. I'm not getting the harshness of the smoke and there seems to be an intensity of the subtle flavors at the time that I'm drawing the smoke into my mouth.

To detect the flavors of a cigar takes, IMHO, patience and attention during the smoke. I can sit around doing who knows what but not really paying attention my cigar and I will generally get the basic "taste" of the cigar - it's usually either just tobacco or its dry or bitter, maybe it sweet. But to detect those flavors, that sweetness that has hints of chocolate or maybe the flavor of coffee, vanilla, whatever... usually requires patience, some practice, and attention to the smoke. That's just my .

[3x5card]

Originally Posted by MikeP

Good post.
I have found that, for me, an excellent way to detect the subtle flavors of the cigar is while I'm drawing the smoke into my mouth to also be inhaling through the nose or just smelling at that point. I'm not getting the harshness of the smoke and there seems to be an intensity of the subtle flavors at the time that I'm drawing the smoke into my mouth.

That, sir, is my secret technique. I find that this gives a double barrel flavor and aroma punch that is simply amazing. Sometimes it might be a bit harsh (if too much of the raw smoke from the buring end is inhaled), but done just right, it provides a simultaneous experience of body, texture, taste and aroma that is impossible to achieve any other way.

Well done!