Blind tasting at home with two friends and no ceremony
Take the bands off and half of what you believe about brands stops working.
Remove the bands, number the cigars, and have someone else hand them out. That is the whole method. Everything else — flights, scorecards, categories — is optional and mostly gets in the way.
Setting it up
- Same format. Robustos against robustos. Otherwise you are testing burn time.
- Same rest. All from stock that has been settled a month or more.
- Bands off an hour early, cigars numbered on a slip beneath them, list kept by someone not smoking that round.
- Three at most. Palate adaptation makes a fourth meaningless.
Keeping it fair
Order matters more than people expect: whatever is smoked first has an advantage. If you can, run the same three cigars in a different order on a second evening — agreement across both is a real result, and disagreement tells you it was the order.
Do not talk during the first third. One person saying "lots of pepper" installs pepper in everyone else's notes, and you end up with one opinion held by three people.
Do this: write your score before the reveal, and do not adjust it afterwards. The whole value of the exercise is the gap between what you scored and what you expected to score, and adjusting erases exactly that.
What usually happens
Two things, reliably. Price predicts scores much less than anyone assumes — mid-priced cigars regularly beat expensive ones in blind conditions. And people identify their own favourites less often than they expect, which is humbling and useful in equal measure.
What blind tasting does not do is settle arguments about which cigar is better. It settles arguments about whether you can tell.
Afterwards
Write the note before the reveal, then add one line after: what you thought it was. That second line, read a year later, is the most interesting part of the entry — it records your assumptions as well as your palate.
Score first, reveal second
Entries in Ligero are one screen: score out of ten, a couple of sentences, save. For a blind round, save the entry before the reveal and add the name afterwards — the journal keeps them in the order you wrote them, so the sequence stays honest.
Read next
Photographing a band so it reads the first time
Light across the print, not into it. Everything else is holding still.
Tasting & notesSmoking the same cigar twice: what to record the second time
The second note is where a journal stops being a diary and starts being data.
Buying & authenticityReading a cigar band
Brand, line, factory marks and the words that are there purely to sell.