manowar5150 wrote:I may need to pick your brain one day on this subject. Others say to age all your cigars. The more the better, or words to that effect. Interesting.
People disagree, but in my experience, I have never found age to harm a cigar. Some don't improve, some improve a little, some improve a lot, some improve quickly, some more slowly, and the longer it goes the smaller the improvements with each passing year get (diminishing returns, at rates different for every cigar), but I've never found a LOWERING of overall "quality" due to age.
Generally, age reduces strength but causes the different flavors to "marry", and usually this "marriage" is much tastier than the mere sum of its parts (which is what you taste when smoking that same cigar when it's young).
It's not that simple, but that's a good high-level summary and approximation.
Although not perfect (it doesn't address stength changes or long timespans), a good analogy is spaghetti and sauce. Boil the spaghetti, add sauce, mix. Eat half of it right now. Not bad. Put the rest in the fridge and eat it 2-3 days later. Wow, much better because the flavors have "married".
If you define "quality" mostly as just strength, then yes, age can "harm" a cigar. But if you define "quality" more broadly, as I believe you should, then in my experience it never does. What you lose in strength, you usually gain in richer, merged, more complex flavors to enjoy.
If you're a "powerhead" guy who mostly wants super-strong cigars, then yes, smoke them quickly and don't age them. But most guys are into cigars for more than just power, and want to appreciate rich, long-aged flavors.
Please note that, in general, only relatively strong cigars should be long-aged. Ones that aren't strong just don't improve much.
Here's what I do: I buy only strong cigars, and in quantities larger than what I intend to smoke in the near future. If you repeat this often enough, aging just automatically happens, because you automatically build up excess stock. It's easy!
I HIGHLY recommend that, if you're going to do this, you Sharpie the acquisition date (I like "MM/YY" format) on each cigar box or bundle, or if necessary, on a cigar's cello itself. This way, years later, you know exactly how old everything is, without needing to create and maintain any external registry (paper records, Excel spreadsheets, etc.).
Hope this helps!
.