Air Curing

The standard cure for cigar tobacco: leaves are hung in an open barn and dried slowly by ambient air over roughly four to eight weeks, with no added heat. Chlorophyll breaks down, starches convert, and the leaf turns from green to yellow to brown.

Air curing preserves the low-sugar, high-nitrogen chemistry that gives cigar leaf its character, and it is the reason cigar tobacco tastes nothing like flue-cured cigarette leaf.