It is one of the happiest moments for every cigar lover; the moment he unboxed his newly bought humidor. Just like the happiness we feel in our childhood years, and even still, when we open the gift package on our birthday. Although we were able to immediately put batteries into the toys we bought in our childhood and start enjoying them, it is not possible to say the same for our humidur. Before we leave our precious cigars to our humidors, we need to make sure our humidor is in good condition to take care of them.

It is especially important that we pass our wooden humidors through this process, whose English is "Seasoning". So why? In fact, it is very simple, in order to keep your cigars in a suitable humid environment, first of all the wood walls of your humidor must have absorbed moisture into the humid environment. Otherwise, no matter what humidifier you put in, it will humidify your humidor instead of creating a humid environment for your cigars.

We can do this preparation job in two ways. The former seems to me more secure and fairly simple, although it takes a little longer than the second. For this, pure water (ironing water is very suitable for this job) is filled in an empty container and it is enough to put it in your humidor with your hygrometer. Close the cover you will make afterwards and wait at least 24 hours. During this time, the walls of your humidor will begin to slowly absorb moisture. When you open the cover after 24 hours, the rate shown by your hygrometer is important. If it shows around 69-71%, your humidor is pretty much ready, if it's below that, the walls need to absorb a little more moisture. For this, you need to leave your humidor with pure water for another 24 hours. If the water is running low or run out, refresh it. With this method, when you bring the humidity of your empty humidor to 69-71% or even slightly higher (which may take a few days to two weeks depending on the humidor), it means that you can gradually place your cigars inside. Take out the bowl of water, fill your humidifier and place it in your humidor. At this point I would recommend putting all your cigars in threes rather than at once, so that if the humidity changes with new cigars each time you can adjust it.

The second method is to moisten the walls of your humidor lightly using a clean, lint-free sponge and distilled water, usually at the very beginning, or on the second or third day of the above method. Although this method prepares your humidor in a shorter time because you give water directly to the walls, it is a risky method in my opinion and should be applied very carefully. Because when you wipe the walls with pure watery sponge, if you dilute it too much, you may cause the wood to rotate or even rot or mold in the future. So I myself clearly prefer the first method.

Actually, there is a third method other than these two methods. Currently, humidor preparation kits are available on the market. The most consistent, high quality of these is the Boveda Humidor Prep Kit I have used before. With Boveda's bidirectional humidification technique, you can bring your humidor to suitable conditions where you can put your cigars in a period of 14 days.

Of course, the most important point, which applies to all three methods above, is that your hygrometer, which will measure the humidity, is correctly calibrated and measuring correctly. Otherwise, it is not possible to understand whether your humidor is ready or not. If that's okay too, you can now unpack your new humidor.