Cigar tobacco may take three years to fully cure and ferment.
The first tobacco exported to Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century spent weeks in the hot and humid holds of ships. The cargo was very much improved by the trip and most tobacco curing, especially the tobacco grown for cigars, is an attempt to improve on what happened accidentally during those voyages. Tobacco for cigars is cured and then fermented. The process reduces the nicotine content and increases the sugar content of the leaves and can take up to three years to complete. The details are the trade secrets of various cigar companies that combine differently cured tobaccos to roll cigars.
Instructions
1. Using a tobacco knife, cut tobacco leaves from the plants in early September, when the leaves begin to change color from green to yellow. Tobacco knives look like scythes with shorter handles.
2. Pile the leaves and loosely sew piles of leaves together using a thick needle and a long cord. Hang the bundles on tobacco sticks, which are about the diameter of a broom handle and up to 15 feet long.
3. Hang the tobacco sticks from the rafters of a tobacco barn. The leaves are still alive at that point and will continue to convert carbohydrates in the leaves into simple sugars.
4. Take the leaves down after eight to ten weeks, when the leaves have died and turned brown.
5. Pile bundles of 25 leaves on top of one another to create tobacco "bulks" up to four feet high. Allow the temperature in the middle of these bulks to reach up to 130 degrees. This process is called "sweating."
6. Pull the leaves out of the middle of the bulk every two or three months. Shake them to aerate them and then set those leaves on the top and bottom of the bulk. Rotate the leaves like this up to eight times over a time of up to two years.
7. Un-bulk the tobacco leaves and sort them one by one into new bundles. Some leaves will be used for cigar wrappers, some will become cigar filler or binders and some will be discarded. Allow the new bundles to "sleep" in wooden boxes for up to a year before using them to roll cigars.
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