Seasoning a New Humidor in Morocco: The Dry-Climate Method

A brand-new humidor is a trap for cigars. Its cedar lining leaves the workshop with dry, thirsty wood, and the first instinct — proudly shelving your collection on the evening of the purchase — amounts to feeding it to the box: within a week, the wood will have drained the moisture from every stick. Seasoning is the operation that charges the wood with water before any tobacco is entrusted to it. It requires no rare equipment and no special knack, only ten to fifteen days of patience and respect for two or three prohibitions. Here they are, in the order you will need them.

Why a new humidor steals your cigars’ moisture

The Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) that lines quality humidors was chosen precisely because it is hygroscopic: it absorbs moisture when the air carries too much and releases it when the air dries out. That buffering effect is what smooths the swings and gives a humidor its worth — our guide to choosing a humidor covers it in detail.

But a buffer, on delivery, is empty. The wood has equilibrated with the air of the workshop and then the warehouse, at around 8 to 10% water by weight, when a humidor’s cruising state demands considerably more. Shut inside a closed box, that wood takes water wherever it finds it: from the glass of water you give it during seasoning — or, failing that, from your cigars. The mass ratio settles the argument: a desktop humidor pits two or three kilograms of cedar against a few dozen grams of tobacco. In that tug-of-war over relative humidity, the tobacco always loses.

Before you start: the hygrometer first

The whole seasoning is steered by the hygrometer, and a new hygrometer can drift by 5 to 10 points: calibrate it before day one, with a kit or the salt test — the full procedure is in our guide to cigar humidity and Boveda packs. Twenty-four hours are enough, and they spare you from declaring the seasoning complete on the word of an instrument that lies.

Leave trays, shelves and dividers inside the humidor for the whole operation: that cedar needs charging too. A shelf seasoned outside the box, or not at all, will afterwards behave like a dry sponge in the middle of a settled climate.

The 84% pack method: slow, safe, unsupervised

This is the method we recommend, the one that cannot damage the box. Seasoning packs (Boveda “seasoning”, 84% set point) are ordinary two-way packs, deliberately set high: enough to charge the wood quickly, not enough to soak it or make water condense on the walls.

1. Day 0 — the light wipe-down. Go over the interior with a clean microfibre cloth, barely damp with distilled water, to remove dust and manufacturing sawdust. The cloth should leave the wood matt, not glistening: cedar where water beads is cedar that will warp.
2. Place the packs on the shelves, perforated face clear, without touching the walls. Rough dosage: one 60 g pack per 25 cigars of stated capacity — a “50” box takes two, a “100” three or four. For a cabinet, count one 320 g pack per 25 litres.
3. Close it, and open no more than once a day, just long enough to read the hygrometer. Every opening releases the charged air and drags the process out.
4. Watch the curve. In the first days the hygrometer climbs quickly then falls back between readings: that is the wood drinking. Stabilisation comes gradually, within ten to fifteen days for a desktop humidor.
5. Stopping criterion: 65 to 70% held for three days running with no intervention. Then remove the seasoning packs and switch to your permanent humidification.

The 84% packs often come out still soft: that is normal, and no reason to leave them in — their set point belongs to seasoning, not to keeping.

The traditional method: the glass of distilled water

Before calibrated packs existed, humidors were seasoned with a glass of water, and the method remains valid for anyone wanting to skip a purchase: a glass or bowl of distilled water placed on the floor of the empty humidor, lid closed, with the same stopping criterion as above. Allow a little longer — evaporation from an open water surface is less regular than a saline membrane — and a calibrated hygrometer becomes indispensable, since nothing caps the climb: in a cool, closed room, a large volume of water can push the box beyond reason.

Distilled or demineralised, never from the tap: limescale settles in the fibres and whitens the wood, chlorine perfumes it, and the micro-organisms in running water find everything they need to thrive in a closed, damp, dark box.

The five mistakes that damage a new humidor

• Sponging the walls. The advice still circulates: wipe the walls generously to “save time”. Soaked wood swells and warps, and the lid’s fit — the very seal of the humidor — goes out of true. Three days saved can cost the box.
• Tap water, for the reasons given above. Distilled water is sold in supermarkets and pharmacies for next to nothing.
• Haste. Slipping in “just two or three cigars” on day 4 because the box reads 68%: the evening’s figure is not the wood’s equilibrium, and those scouts will dry out. A humidor is judged on three stable days, not on one reading.
• Seasoning an electronic humidor switched on. Thermoregulated cabinets are seasoned like any other — their shelves are cedar — but with the electronics off: an active system that also dries would work against your seasoning packs.
• Believing seasoning is done for good. In the first weeks, freshly charged wood consumes storage packs faster than it should; allow the margin, and refer to the dosage table in our humidity guide. A humidor left empty and open all summer gets seasoned again, in the short version.

How to tell the humidor is ready

Three concurring signs deliver the verdict. The calibrated hygrometer holds 65 to 70% for three consecutive days without you touching anything. The lid, dropped from a few centimetres, settles onto its cushion of air with the muffled sigh of a tight box. And the smell on opening is that of clean cedar — woody, faintly spicy — with no staleness and no burrow-like dampness, which would signal excess water somewhere in the box.

Seasoning in Morocco: longer, never wetter

A new humidor delivered to Rabat, Casablanca or Marrakech does not start from the same point as in Europe: transport, then the air of the room — often below 35% humidity inland, 50% on the coast — have dried the cedar more deeply. It will therefore absorb more, and for longer: allow fifteen to twenty days, and do not hesitate to add one seasoning pack more than the basic rule for humidors above 50 cigars. The temptation, on seeing the hygrometer plateau at 60%, is to wet the wood: that is precisely the mistake that warps a humidor. Patience and packs, nothing else. Distilled water is sold in pharmacies and in the ironing aisle of supermarkets; tap water, hard and chlorinated, is to be avoided. The end-of-seasoning test stays the same: 65 to 70% held three days running, humidor closed, without intervention. CIGARA will deliver its humidors already seasoned, which settles the question for those who do not have three weeks to wait.

What comes next: cruising state

Remove the seasoning packs, install the storage humidification — 65% is the set point we recommend in a hot, dry climate, for the reasons detailed in our guide to Boveda packs — then your cigars, without crowding them: air must circulate between the rows. Place the hygrometer at mid-height, away from the humidity source, and grant the box a weekly glance.

In an arid climate, Morocco’s included, a freshly seasoned humidor remains a work in progress for its first weeks: the room’s dry air pulls at the box every time it is opened, and newly charged wood gives its water up all the more willingly. Our guide to storing cigars in a dry climate has the long-term settings. Properly seasoned and properly set, the humidor then fades from your attention — which is exactly what is asked of it.