Gregory L. Pease, Associate Editor
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, if only for my own benefit: A single experience of something worthy of deeper consideration is always insufficient for critical evaluation. One cigar, one bowl of pipe tobacco, one sip of a great whisky does not, cannot, tell the whole story. This was brought home in rather bold relief just the other day when I was smoking the second example of a really good cigar, and found myself enjoying it even more than the first. Here’s the back story.
One of the perks of my job as Associate Editor of a cigar magazine is that I get the occasional free cigar to smoke. (Yeah, okay. Nothing is ever really free.) Sometimes, it’s a single, and though I always appreciate them, I am not likely to write about them, especially if I don’t have much good to say, because it’s unfair to harshly judge a cigar based on a single sample. (The probability of one bad cigar in a box of good ones is higher than the probability of a good cigar in a box of dog rockets.)
What fate befalls thee, Lonsadale?
You’d think it would be the easiest thing in the world, and the best job ever, right? Smoke a cigar, write some comments about what it tastes like, what it smells like, what it burns like, how much you liked or didn’t like it, and give it a score from a 100 point scale. Simple? Not quite. Since we’re a real magazine, not just another cigar blog, we’ve got a responsibility to our readers to be as fair, as professional, and as objective as possible. We want all our reviewers to deliver commentary and ratings that can be relied upon consistently by our readers. In other words, though we might each like different things (we do), and we might each describe the same cigar differently (we do), we should each wind up assigning that cigar a fairly similar score. That’s where things can get challenging.
