Plume or mould: telling them apart in ten seconds
Colour, texture, and whether it brushes off. Two of those three settle it.
White and dusty, brushes off clean: plume. Blue, green or fuzzy, and it leaves a stain: mould. If you are unsure after the brush test, treat it as mould — the cost of being wrong in that direction is one cigar, not a box.
What plume actually is
Plume — bloom — is crystallised oil that migrates to the surface of a well-aged cigar. It looks like a fine dust, evenly spread, white to very pale grey, and it wipes away with a soft brush leaving the wrapper unmarked.
Whether it is a sign of quality is argued about endlessly. It is at least a sign of a cigar that has been stored still and long enough for oils to move, which is not nothing.
What mould looks like
Mould grows in spots rather than a film. It is fuzzy or raised, often blue-green but sometimes white, and it favours the foot and any crease in the wrapper. Brushed, it smears rather than lifts, and underneath it the wrapper is discoloured.
The smell is the giveaway people forget: a mouldy box smells of a damp cellar, and once you have smelled it once you will not confuse the two again.
Do this: brush a small patch with a dry, soft brush and look at the wrapper underneath. Clean leaf means plume. A stain, a rough patch or a smear means mould, and the box needs handling today rather than at the weekend.
What to do about mould
- Isolate. Take the affected cigars out of the humidor entirely, in a sealed bag, before you inspect anything else.
- Inspect the rest, one by one. Neighbours in the same layer are the most likely to be affected.
- Drop the humidity a few points and check the temperature; mould needs both to be high.
- Wipe the interior with a dry cloth. Not water, and not alcohol on cedar you intend to keep using.
Cigars with surface mould on the wrapper can sometimes be saved by wiping and quarantine. Anything with mould at the foot, or a musty smell in the filler, is finished — that is the smell you will be smoking.
Preventing the next one
Mould is a humidity-plus-temperature problem, almost always after a summer or a refill that overshot. Keep the target in the sixties, keep the box out of a warm room, and give a newly arrived box two weeks apart from your existing stock: quarantine is the cheapest insurance in this hobby.
Isolation is easier when the shelves are already separate
Ligero keeps several humidors — home, travel case, a box you are ageing — and each lot sits in one of them with its own arrival date. When something needs quarantining, moving it to its own shelf and knowing exactly when it arrived, and what came with it, takes a few taps rather than an evening of reconstruction.
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