Resetting your palate: water, coffee, or nothing
Most of what dulls halfway through is adaptation, and adaptation is fixed by time, not by drinks.
Still water at room temperature, and a few minutes of breathing ordinary air. That is the whole reset. Everything more elaborate is either a drink you wanted anyway or an active hindrance.
Why things go dull
Your nose and tongue adapt to a continuous stimulus within minutes — the same mechanism that makes you stop smelling a room after you walk into it. Halfway through a cigar you are not tasting less because the cigar changed; you are tasting less because you have been tasting.
Adaptation reverses with time and clean air, which is why a five-minute pause outdoors does more than any palate cleanser sold for the purpose.
Between two cigars
Twenty minutes is the honest minimum, and an hour is better. The second cigar of an evening is always at a disadvantage; if you are comparing two, alternate the order across two separate evenings before drawing conclusions.
Eating something plain — bread, a plain cracker — helps more than a strong flavour, which just replaces one adaptation with another.
Do this: when you score the second cigar of a session, note that it was second. It is the single most common reason for an unfairly low score, and it costs three words.
What drinks actually do
- Still water: rinses, adds nothing. The default.
- Sparkling water: carbonation scrubs, and some people find it genuinely helpful between thirds.
- Coffee: pairs well and resets nothing. It is a strong flavour of its own.
- Spirits: the opposite of a reset — alcohol dries and numbs, and after two the notes get generous.
The lemon-and-espresso myth
Sharp acid or a hot espresso feels like it clears the palate because it is loud enough to overwrite what was there. That is masking, not resetting, and it usually costs you the first third of the next cigar. If a cleanser has a strong taste, it is competing with what you are about to smoke.
Two entries, and the order recorded
Notes in Ligero are timestamped by when you wrote them, so two cigars from one evening stay in the order you smoked them. A line in the second entry saying it followed something else is the difference between a fair record and a mystery about why you once rated a favourite a six.
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