Past thirty cigars, memory stops working
Not because you are forgetful. Because the questions get harder than recall.
Thirty is roughly where a humidor stops being a shelf you know and becomes an inventory you guess at. Not because thirty is a magic number, but because the questions you ask of it become questions about dates.
The questions that break first
- "How long has this been in here?" Recall is unreliable past a few weeks, and this is the question everything else depends on.
- "Have I smoked this one already?" With singles from splits and shop visits, this becomes genuinely unanswerable.
- "Did I like it?" You remember the last one you smoked and the best one you ever smoked. Everything in between blurs.
- "What is left of that box?" Counting requires opening, and opening costs stability.
Why it degrades so quickly
Cigars all look similar in a box, most of the distinguishing information is on a band you removed, and the intervals involved — months to years — are exactly the range human memory handles worst. It is not a character flaw; it is the wrong tool for the job.
Do this: the minimum useful record is three fields — what it is, when it arrived, how many are left. Everything else is a nice-to-have, and a shelf with those three answered is already better organised than most collections twice its size.
The minimum worth keeping
A record has to be quicker than the thing it replaces or it will not survive the month. Three fields per box takes seconds and answers the rotation question forever. Add a score and two sentences per cigar smoked and you also answer "did I like it" a year later.
What is not worth keeping: prices, elaborate categories, and anything you have to maintain rather than simply add to.
What changes when you write it down
The first thing you notice is how much older some of your stock is than you thought. The second is that your buying and your smoking are not the same list — most people discover they own three boxes of something they rate seven out of ten and none of the thing they rate nine.
What it is, when it arrived, how many are left
That is exactly the shape of a lot in Ligero: the cigar, the date it went in, the count, and which humidor it lives in. From those three the app derives the rest — what has rested, what is ready, what has been sitting for two years, and which to smoke first. Entries add the other half: a score out of ten and a couple of sentences.
Read next
How many cigars is the right number to keep
Enough that something is always ready, few enough that you know what you own.
Storage & ageingSmoking the oldest first without losing track of what that is
Rotation is a rule everyone agrees with and nobody follows, because it needs a record.
Tasting & notesWriting a tasting note you will still understand next year
Three sentences beat three paragraphs, if they are the right three.