A cigar database built and kept current by the people smoking them

Every line in the database carries the brand, line name, country of origin, strength, body and flavour notes, plus a description, release year and rarity. Limited-edition and discontinued lines are flagged as such.

Rarity is a graded value rather than a label: common, uncommon, rare, very rare or unicorn, shown on the cigar as a chip.

Wrapper, binder and filler are recorded down to origin and leaf — wrapper type, origin and leaf; binder origin and leaf; filler origins and leaves. Below the line, each vitola has its own name, length, ring gauge, shape and MSRP, so a Toro and a Robusto of the same blend are two separate entries, not one row with a size guess attached.

The shape is recorded from a fixed set rather than typed in, so the same cigar is not a robusto on one row and a Robusto on another: robusto, toro, churchill, corona, lancero, gordo, belicoso, torpedo, figurado, perfecto, panatela, lonsdale, petit corona and rothschild.

Photos hang off the line rather than being one thumbnail: band shots, box shots and everything else, in a gallery.

Every rating shown on a line is an aggregate built from members who actually logged and rated that cigar in their own journal, with a count alongside it. There is no path to rate a cigar you haven't logged, so the number reflects people who smoked it, not anonymous drive-by scores.

If a cigar isn't in the catalogue, you can add it yourself. Production cigars get reviewed and then join the catalogue for everyone to browse and rate — you're not just filling in your own journal, you're extending the database.

Genuine one-offs — a custom roll, a private blend nobody else can buy — stay private to the member who added them rather than being published as if anyone could find or order one.

Every cigar page has a control for flagging the listing itself, with four options — the specs, a photo that is missing or belongs to another cigar, a duplicate entry, or something else — and room to say more. A curator works through what comes in, which is how a catalogue members built stays current.

If you have the cigar in front of you but not its name, photograph the band. The scanner reads it and matches it against the catalogue, opening the cigar when it is confident and offering the near misses when it is not.

Filter the catalogue by wrapper, by strength — mild, mild-medium, medium, medium-full or full — by body, by country of origin, and by brand, instead of scrolling an alphabetical list. The brand filter is searchable rather than a dropdown, because a list of every brand in the catalogue is not something anyone scrolls; your own most-logged brands sit at the top of it as chips.

Three more narrow by how a cigar has landed rather than what is in it: only cigars the community rates four stars and up, only what is already in your humidor, and only what you have not rated yet. The last two need an account, since both are questions about you.

Results are ordered by brand A to Z unless you say otherwise, and you can reorder them by community rating, by how often members log them, by newest, or — signed in — by your own rating.

The Android app adds size to the filter sheet, as a length range and a ring-gauge range.

Each cigar has its own page you can reach without an account: the specs, the table of sizes beneath the line, what members taste in it, the drinks it gets paired with most, and the cigars closest to it. Brands have their own page listing everything under them.

Alongside the catalogue there is the Almanac: a library of written guides and roundups — the best cigars of a given wrapper, what a country's tobacco actually tastes like, how one line compares with another.

They are written from the catalogue rather than about it. Each article starts as a brief assembled from real rows — the specs, the prices, the member ratings — and a language model writes the prose from that brief and nothing else. Every number in the draft is then checked back against the brief automatically — a figure the data does not support fails before a person ever reads it — and the cigars it names are checked the same way. What survives that goes to a human for review, and only then is it published.

Articles built on figures that move are regenerated on a schedule — and a regenerated version goes back through review as a proposed revision rather than swapping itself into the live page, so nothing published changes unattended. Each one keeps its revision history and links to the cigars it discusses.