Blind Tasting: How Big Cigar Media Really Judge a Cigar
If you’ve ever wondered how a band goes from a good smoke in someone’s hand to a Top-25 laurel on magazine paper, you’re really asking one thing: how do the big voices taste? The short answer is that most of the influential outlets try to separate the smoke from the story—some more rigorously than others. “Blind” in this world doesn’t mean blindfolds and mystique; it means tasters aren’t told what they’re smoking, so price, brand loyalty, and hype can’t lean on the scale. But each publication has its own way of getting there, and those differences—how cigars are sourced, who knows the code, how many palates weigh in, when retasts occur—shape the rankings you see every winter.
Cigar Aficionado is the template many people imagine when they hear “blind tasting.” Their core rule is simple: every rating in the magazine (and in Cigar Insider) is done blind—original bands off, white coded bands on, and a wall between the tasting panel and any identifying detail like brand, blend or price. Crucially, the person who buys and re-bands cigars—the “tasting coordinator”—does not sit on the panel; they’re the only one who knows which code equals which cigar. Most cigars are purchased at retail, coded, stored, and then handed out to staff reviewers to smoke independently; scores are averaged, and if a result looks like an outlier, the cigars may be re-smoked before a final number is set. Come December, the Top 25 isn’t a one-and-done list pulled from earlier notes; finalists are re-banded and re-tasted in elimination rounds until a winner emerges. It’s a year-round pipeline followed by a very specific December playoff, all of it blind on the panelist side.
Cigar Journal runs a version of blind tasting that’s wider rather than taller. Instead of a small in-house panel, they rely on a large, international team—80-plus panelists based around the world, with 15–20 tasters judging each cigar. Rings come off, generic codes go on, and everyone uses a standardized rating protocol that records construction, draw, burn, strength, and the progression of aromas. The arithmetic matters: the final score is a mean of the panel’s results after trimming the highest and lowest evaluations to reduce noise. That’s why their notes often read like a consensus rather than a singular voice; the text reflects common perceptions that survived the statistical smoothing. The scale stays blind right to the end: even the person consolidating results can be separated from the cigar’s identity. When Journal publishes its year-end Top 25, it’s essentially the harvest of those blind panels: hundreds of cigars smoked unbanded, data cleaned, and the most memorable singled out for the list.
Then there’s a third path that’s honest about being different: halfwheel does not review blind. Their “Review Manifesto” spells it out—too many cigars they cover are pre-release, unusually shaped, or otherwise easy to identify even without a band, so the site standardizes by reviewing unblind across the board. It’s a philosophical line in the sand: if the playing field can’t actually be blind, don’t pretend. That doesn’t make their notes less useful; it simply means halfwheel’s scores sit in a different category than the blind-panel magazines. The distinction shows up in year-end lists and in how readers use the data: some prefer the lab-coat anonymity of blind tasting, others want the forensic detail of a named, technical review.
If you zoom out to the broader media ecosystem, you find a few more flavors of “blind.” Blind Man’s Puff is exactly what it sounds like: every review is blind, multiple reviewers smoke the same unbanded, numbered cigars, submit forms, and the site crunches the numbers—yes, including outlier handling and weighting—to produce a composite score and consensus notes. This is crowdsourcing, but with a trained crowd and a repeatable form. CigarsLover Magazine also leans into blind tasting, and when awards season comes around, they re-select top-scoring cigars and test them again blind to settle the final ranking—an echo of Aficionado’s December retastes, but in their own house style. Both approaches try to avoid “one taster’s Tuesday mood” becoming destiny for a cigar.
None of these systems were invented in a vacuum, and you feel that in the culture around them. Friends-of-Habanos forum vets, for instance, have long run blind competitions and training games (even triangulation exercises where two cigars are identical and one is not), sharpening the same muscles the pro panels use: calibrate the palate, keep notes, and admit that bias is clever at sneaking in through brand familiarity. Even within factories, you’ll hear about internal blind panels as part of product development—weekly tastings where blends are judged without labels so a room full of professionals can argue honestly. The point is consistent: when you can’t lean on the band, you have to listen to the smoke.
What “Blind” Actually Looks Like in Practice
On paper, “bands off” sounds tidy. In real rooms, blind tasting needs logistics. Sourcing matters first. Aficionado emphasizes buying at retail for the core pipeline, which keeps the test closer to what consumers will actually smoke; that also means accounting for batch variation and weeding out storage issues. With Journal’s global panel, editors centralize incoming samples, check condition, code them, then ship unbanded cigars to panelists with enough rest time built in to settle from travel—otherwise you’re really rating the mailman’s jolts, not the cigar. The coordinator role (at Aficionado) or the editorial back-office (at Journal) becomes a kind of air-traffic control, guarding the code and the condition alike.
Panel design is the next lever. A small, standing panel (Aficionado) is tight and calibrated; you get voices that know each other’s palates, can spot their own biases, and can re-smoke quickly when a result looks odd. A wide, rotating panel (Journal) is noisy in a helpful way; more tasters across climates and backgrounds, plus the math trick of trimming extremes, can sand down idiosyncrasies. Blind Man’s Puff sits somewhere else on the map: a distributed volunteer panel with structured forms and math to corral the variance into something legible for readers. Each model has trade-offs. A small team can move fast and go deep; a big team can make its conclusions feel more universal; a distributed team can catch surprises and outliers that a single office might miss.
Retasting is where serious systems earn their keep. Cigars are agricultural and fickle; storage, shipment, and even the week’s weather can nudge performance. That’s why Aficionado’s December routine—rebanding Top-25 contenders and running them again, blind, in bracketed rounds—feels so different from a simple “sort by highest score” list. Journal’s year-end approach is also built on blind groundwork: hundreds of coded smokes across the year produce a pool of standouts to spotlight. CigarsLover makes this explicit with a published description: pull the year’s best, taste blind again, compare results, and fix the final ranking. You may still disagree with any given pick, but it’s important to know that for many outlets the December list is the second answer, not the first.
Scoring gets the headlines, yet the form behind the number is what shapes behavior. Journal tells its panelists exactly what to log—combustion, draw resistance, construction, strength, aroma development—and the editors synthesize the shared perceptions into tasting notes that read like a group portrait. Aficionado’s notes are written by staff tasters, but under the same blind condition; “we taste cigars blind” isn’t a slogan there so much as muscle memory built since 1992. Blind Man’s Puff publishes its rating bands (e.g., “90–91 Very Good; 92–93 Great”), demystifying the number so readers can translate it into a lived experience. Halwheel’s unblind reviews compensate with grinding detail on draws, burn corrections, and construction—another way of earning trust without the blind frame. Different routes, same goal: give readers a fair sense of what they’ll actually get when fire meets leaf.
There’s one more practical wrinkle: true anonymity is hard for distinctive shapes, rare releases, or cigars famous for how they look. Even a blind panelist who’s seen an Chisel or a Flying Pig a hundred times can probably spot one unbanded. Serious outlets acknowledge that. Aficionado’s system relies on codes and avoids telling tasters anything about the lineup, which at least removes confirmation. Halwheel’s answer is to skip blind entirely. The candid lesson for readers is not that blind tasting is perfect, but that good systems reduce bias enough to let the cigar stand on its own.
What It Means for Rankings—and for You
When a Top-25 drops, it carries the weight of these processes. Aficionado’s list is the product of a year’s blind ratings plus a final week of blind playoffs—that’s why you’ll see their editors emphasize the retaste rounds when they announce No. 1. Journal’s year-end list is a mirror of their panel culture: many palates, many notes, one consolidated judgment born from a deliberately broad sample. CigarsLover’s awards underline a similar idea with a second blind pass on finalists. And halfwheel’s annual wrap-ups synthesize unblind but highly technical review work into rankings they stand behind precisely because the methodology is consistent, even if it isn’t blind. Understanding these differences won’t make you love a crowned cigar you already dislike, but it will help you read the lists correctly: what you’re really seeing is a method wearing a medal.
If you want to try this at home—and you should—steal a few pages from the pros. Source two or three sticks from retail (not the same box your buddy keeps on his radiator). Unband them and mark with a code someone else holds. Rest them so shipping shake isn’t part of the test. Smoke with a simple form that forces you to write what you actually taste in the first inch, the middle, and the last third, plus a line on draw and burn. Then swap notes before looking at the answer key. You’ll learn two things fast: first, a band can make you generous or cruel; second, the cigars you keep returning to are probably the ones that make sense on your palate rather than on a shelf talker. If you want to sharpen that skill even more, take a page from the factory and forum world and run a triangulation: three cigars, two identical, one different—spot the odd one out. It’s humbling and addictive.
The bigger point is this: blind tasting isn’t a magic trick, it’s a courtesy—to the leaf, to the maker, and to the smoker trying to decide how to spend money. It strips away story long enough to let combustion, aroma, and finish do the talking. Media houses do it with coordinators, codes, and spreadsheets. You can do it with a Sharpie and a friend. Either way, the question is the same: when you don’t know the name, does the cigar still sing? On the best lists, and in the best rooms, that’s the only ranking that matters.