Hand Rolled Cigars

The Truth about 'Totalmente a Mano' or Hand Rolled Cigars

Automated machines do make a short work out of everything, especially production and manufacturing. Feed the instructions, supply the materials, and leave it to produce. Machines manufacture with consistency expected of automated devices, utilizing on the most minimal of resources and generating zero waste. That makes them highly appropriate with almost all modern industrial applications. But sometimes machines are not always sufficient, or appropriate.

Like in the manufacture of quality cigars. Yes, they still do what is expected, with consistency and efficiency but when manufacturing takes the path of quality, machines are hardly suitable means. Yes they can be programmed to check moisture content, chemical analysis on the tobacco materials and environment modification suitable for the optimal fermenting to take place. But what it decidedly lacks is in terms of judgment and the aptitude to concoct mixture out of the available dissimilar tobacco leaves.

That's how hand rollers cigar makers prided themselves. Human cigar output, even if subjected to human imperfections, are much more desirable than machine made. Because human cigar makers can adjust the creation of cigar with the availability of the tobacco materials, the output is much better blended than with machine made cigars.

For a clearer differentiation, here are some facts regarding hand rolled cigars and machine made cigars.

Machine Made Cigars

Machine made cigars can be observed as totally utilitarian. Because every tobacco scrap is collected and inserted into every single cigar, therefore there is a considerable plus to efficiency.

But these scraps tend also to create air spaces that will have a considerable effect in burning. Such that factory made cigars tend to burn faster (and therefore hotter) than hand rolled cigars, with occasional spits of bits jumping from the burning end.

And the faster it burns the more smoke and the less flavor it has, therefore downgrading the experience of smoking the cigar.

Hand Rolled Cigars

Since fillers have a prominent value in producing much of the cigar's taste, long fillers are decidedly more capable of producing fine flavors than short fillers, which roughly consist of chopped up leaves and stems. Long filler cigars are the remarkably easy to produce by hand rolling than by machines.

And since it would take a complicated machine allow tobacco mixture, tobacco mixing can therefore be done successfully by human cigar makers.

All in all, the existing mechanical level just could never compete with the skill and experience of an especially good human cigar roller. Perhaps that is the reason how Cuban cigars are often quoted as being the finest in the world and Cuban cigar makers as the best in the art of cigar making. There's just no way for machines to compete with cigars that are "Totalmente a Mano" or "Totally made by Hand".