How to cut your cigar
The secret to cutting a cigar perfectly with a guillotine cutter, cigar scissors, v cutter, or teardrop cutter, is cutting in the right place. Premium cigars are hand rolled using a long filler – whole tobacco leaves that are stripped of stems and veins and bunched. The cap is the only thing holding this roll together, using a natural, foodsafe, vegetable glue called pectin. If all of the cap is cut off, the cigar goes to pieces.
Most premium cigars feature a triple cap, visible as three subtle lines in the wrapper of the cigar near the capped end, others may have just a single cap line, especially if they feature a pigtail cap. For cigars with the triple cap line, the line closest to the end of the cigar serves as a guide for where to cut. This even applies torpedo or belicoso cigars, where these cap lines will spiral towards the point of the cigar, a slanted cut matching the angle of the cap lines is desirable in this case. For cigars with only a single cap line, aim to just cut a couple of millimetres of the cigar off. The philosophy behind this approach is that less is more. You may test the cut by drawing on the cigar as if it were lit – if satisfied, you are ready to light and enjoy. If the draw is too restrictive for your preferences, you can cut a little more off, test again, and repeat until satisfied.
With a V cutter, instead of cutting more off to open the draw, cut the same amount again, but with the V cutter rotated ninety degrees from the previous cut. This style of cutting is called a rose cut or cross cut, and allows additional surface area to draw through.
If instead you are using a punch cutter, gently rotate the cutter back and forth as you press it into the cap, allowing the rotation to cut a circle in the cap. If you rely only on pressure to cut through the cap, you risk cracking the cigar. Once the punch has cut through the cap, withdraw the punch, tilting the punch just as it exits the cap to assist in lifting the circle of tobacco leaf that has been cut out of the cap. On retractable punch cutters, simply retract the blade to clear this piece of tobacco out of the cutter and ready it for its next use.
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