I did smoke Mystery Stick #1 on October 4 but misplaced my notes and have been hoping that it pops up so I can write a review. However, as the days and weeks pass, there's less and less hope that I'll stumble upon it so strictly from memory, here goes:
Toro-sized stick, 6 x 50-ish, dark brown wrapper, a little veiny but nothing that I thought would influence the burn too much. Pre-light - good smell, v-cut, cold draw was nice and iirc, little more on the leathery side. Sparked it up and first few draws gave me a back throat pepper burn. Seemed to settle down after about 15 minutes. Smoked well, good draw and smoke production...then things went south.
Don't know but highly suspect the humidity in the air caused burn issues in the second half of the first third. Touched it up and things seemed fine. A little bit of the back throat pepper burn started to come back. And then I had more burn issues. Same as earlier but it wasn't like I was distracted and reading the paper or playing a game on my iPad, it just wasn't burning too well. Touched it up and things again seemed fine.
I wasn't picking up any flavors or at least memorable flavors but no sooner had I touched it up when I had more burn issues! Same old, same old, she wasn't burning very straight and worst yet, I had to draw hard in order to get any kind of smoke. Kept purging to try to keep it from going out. To say the least, I was a bit perturbed.
By now I had settled down in my chair and was looking through the newspaper but couldn't really read anything since keeping the stick going was on the forefront. Took draws a little sooner than what I prefer and wouldn't you know, the bugger still had issues and nearly went out! Re-lit, purged and got it going again...for maybe 10 minutes and then she went out again.
I think I only smoked, maybe, 3-fifths of the stick when I decided to cut bait and end the frustrating evening. Tossed it into my Stinky, finished the paper and my beer and went back into the (air conditioned) house.
Since I received Dan's box on Aug. 25 and I had put them in my cooler with 65% beads, didn't think it was a humidification issue but rather a too-damn-humid-outside issue. So unfortunately I didn't enjoy the smoke but am curious as to what it was. Dan, please enlighten me....
