Cigar Journal Template: What to Record and How to Rate a Cigar

A cigar journal is just a record of what you smoked and what you thought. That is the entire idea. Its job is not to make you sound sophisticated. Its job is to turn a vague feeling into something you can act on next time you are buying.

Three payoffs make it worth the minute it takes. First, memory: you will reliably recall the standouts and steer clear of the duds. Second, patterns: after a couple dozen entries you start to see what you actually like, maybe it is medium-strength Nicaraguans, maybe it is anything with a San Andres wrapper, and that is gold when you shop. Third, value: you stop rebuying things you only thought you liked, and you stop forgetting things you loved.

None of that requires expertise. A beginner's honest one-line note is more useful to future-you than a borrowed paragraph of flowery tasting language. Write what you noticed, in your own words.

Here is the template, field by field. You do not need every line every time, but these are the ones that pull their weight. Think of it as three groups: what it was, how it smoked, and what you thought.

What it was. Cigar name and brand. Wrapper, binder, and filler if you know them. Size and ring gauge, or just the vitola name like Robusto or Toro. Price and where you bought it. The date you smoked it.

How it smoked. The draw, meaning whether it pulled easily or felt tight. The burn, whether it stayed even or needed touch-ups. The construction overall, including whether the ash held. How long it lasted. These are the objective, almost mechanical notes, and they are the easiest to record honestly.

What you thought. Flavor notes broken into the first third, second third, and final third, because good cigars change as they burn and that progression is half the fun. Strength, meaning how hard it hit you. Body, meaning how full and rich it felt, which is a different thing from strength. A pairing, if you had a coffee or a drink with it. And the two fields that matter most for future shopping: an overall rating, and a plain yes or no on whether you would smoke it again.

The smoke again field is the secret weapon. Scores drift and fade, but a hard yes or no is instantly useful when you are standing at a counter deciding.

Rating sounds intimidating. It is not, as long as you are honest and consistent with yourself. The trick is to rate the cigar in front of you, not the reputation on the band.

Smoke it slow, on a full stomach, and pay attention in three acts. The first third is the opening: cold draw, light, first impressions. The middle third is usually where a cigar settles into its core character. The final third often turns up the intensity as the smoke concentrates. Jot a note at each stage instead of trying to summarize at the end, when you have half forgotten how it started.

Then judge a few things separately so one bad trait does not sink everything. Flavor: did you enjoy how it tasted, and was there complexity or did it stay flat. Construction: did the draw and burn cooperate, because a great blend with a plugged draw is still a frustrating smoke. Balance: did anything stick out harshly. Finally, the gut check: would you spend your own money on it again.

Most important rule: compare a cigar to itself and to your own past entries, not to someone else's palate. Your journal is a record of your taste, and that is precisely what makes it useful to you.

You have seen the scores: a cigar rated 92, another a 96, the magazines and sites handing out numbers like report cards. Here is the convention, so you can read those scores without being fooled by them.

The 100-point scale is the dominant one, and in practice almost nothing scores below the 70s, because anything genuinely bad rarely gets published. So the meaningful range is compressed near the top. As a rough reading of the common convention: the low 80s is decent, the high 80s is good, 90 to 94 is very good to excellent, and 95-plus is reserved for the standouts. A 90 is a real compliment, not a C-plus.

Two honest caveats. The scores are subjective, no matter how official the number looks, and they fold flavor, construction, and value into one figure in a way that hides as much as it shows. Different reviewers and different publications are not calibrated to each other, so a 91 from one is not the same as a 91 from another.

Notice what this page does not do: it does not hand any specific cigar a number. That is on purpose. A score is only meaningful inside one consistent rater's system, so the useful version is the one you keep yourself. Build your own scale, even if it is just a 1-to-10 or a three-star gut rating, and apply it the same way every time. Then your 90 means something, because it means something to you.

So should you keep this on paper or in an app? Both work. They fail in different ways, and the honest answer depends on you.

Paper is wonderful right up until it is not. A notebook is cheap, pleasant to write in, and never needs a battery or a signal. The downsides show up later. You cannot search it, so finding that cigar from last March means flipping pages. It cannot add up your patterns for you. And a notebook can be left at home, soaked, or lost, taking years of notes with it.

An app trades a little ceremony for a lot of convenience. You can search every entry, filter by what you liked, see your own patterns emerge, and your notes sync and back up so a lost phone does not erase them. The cost is that you are tapping a screen instead of writing by hand, which some people genuinely prefer to avoid.

This is where I will be plain about Cigarista, since it is our app and you should know the bias. It is built around exactly the fields in this template, so the paper-to-app jump is small: log a cigar, record your wrapper and size and notes, rate it, and keep a humidor and a wishlist alongside. It also reads cigar bands from a photo to fill in the details, and it syncs across your devices so your journal is not trapped on one phone. If the appeal of paper is the ritual, keep the notebook. If the appeal of a journal is actually finding and using what you wrote, an app is the easier path, and ours is a reasonable place to start.

One more thing your journal should hold: the cigars you have not smoked yet but want to. Call it a wishlist or a to-try list. It is the half of the hobby people forget to track.

It works because recommendations arrive at the worst times. A friend names a cigar, you read about one in a guide, someone at the lounge swears by something, and none of it is in front of you when you are actually shopping. A running list closes that gap, so your buying is driven by intent instead of whatever the shop happened to stock.

Keep it light. The name, where you heard about it, and one line on why it caught your attention is plenty. On paper, give it a dedicated page at the back. In an app, this is usually a built-in wishlist, which is one of the quieter reasons a digital journal earns its place: the to-try list and the already-smoked record live side by side, and the cigar you starred last month is right there when you finally find it.