Fewer and better: what a year of your own records shows
Most people smoke more cigars than they enjoy, and own more than they smoke.
A year of notes usually shows two gaps: between what you buy and what you smoke, and between how often you smoke and how often you enjoyed it. Both are visible only in a record.
The two gaps
The first is inventory drift — boxes bought faster than they are smoked, which most people discover the first time they count. The second is more interesting: entries written on rushed evenings score consistently lower, and there are usually more of them than anyone expects.
Why fewer scores higher
Tolerance drops with a gap between cigars, so the first one after a week tastes stronger and more detailed. Attention is also finite: a cigar smoked while doing something else produces a note about the something else.
Do this: compare your scores from evenings when you smoked one cigar with those from evenings when you smoked two. For most people the second cigar averages a point lower, which is a real argument about how to spend a shelf.
Acting on it
Nothing dramatic: buy in smaller quantities, keep a third of the shelf in short formats so a forty-minute window is usable, and leave the good ones for evenings where you can pay attention. That is the whole conclusion, and it comes from your own numbers rather than from advice.
The honest limit of a journal
It records what you did, not what you should do. A record cannot tell you how much to smoke, and this article is not going to either — what it can do is make the trade-off visible instead of leaving it to a vague sense that this box is going down faster than the last one.
Everything on one scale, over a year
Every tasting in Ligero is scored out of ten on the same scale, stamped with when you wrote it and searchable afterwards. That is what turns a hunch about your own habits into something you can check — and it stays yours unless you choose to publish an entry.
Read next
A year of keeping records: what it changes
Mostly it changes what you buy, and it does that by disagreeing with you.
Storage & ageingHow many cigars is the right number to keep
Enough that something is always ready, few enough that you know what you own.
Buying & authenticityPrice per hour: a saner way to compare cigars
A twenty-euro cigar that lasts two hours is cheaper than a ten-euro one that lasts forty minutes.