What to do with a tubed cigar once it is open
The tube protects it and slows everything down. Opened, it becomes an ordinary cigar with a lid.
A sealed tube is excellent short-term protection and mediocre long-term storage. It keeps a cigar safe in a pocket and slows moisture exchange in both directions — including the exchange you want in a humidor.
While it is sealed
Aluminium and glass tubes hold humidity well for weeks, which is why they are the standard for travel and for shops selling singles. A cigar in a good tube survives a day in a jacket pocket far better than a bare one.
What they do not do is age a cigar in any useful way. The point of ageing is exchange between cigars and cedar; a tube is a small isolated climate with nothing in it but the one stick.
Once it is open
Treat it as a normal cigar. If you are not smoking it that day, put it in the humidor — with or without the tube, but leave the cap off so it can equalise.
Do this: if you are ageing tubed cigars for more than a few months, take them out of the tubes and put them in the humidor properly. Otherwise you are storing them, not ageing them, and the difference shows after a year.
The cedar sleeve
Some tubes contain a thin cedar sleeve. That is worth keeping: it buffers moisture and adds the aroma the tube itself cannot. Cigars stored in cedar-lined tubes fare noticeably better than in bare metal.
Tubes for travel
For one or two cigars, a tube beats a case: nothing crushes it and it needs no humidification for a day or two. Beyond a couple of days, add a small pack to a rigid case instead and leave the tubes at home.
A single stick is a lot too
A lot in Ligero can be one cigar as easily as a box of twenty-five, with its own arrival date and humidor. That is what keeps the tubed single you were given in March from vanishing behind three boxes and reappearing in two years as a mystery.
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