A journal for every cigar you smoke
Ratings, tasting notes, photos and the details you forget by next week — kept in one place and yours to look back on.
Start your cigar journalWhat a journal entry holds
An entry starts with an overall rating out of five, and goes as deep as you want from there. Four separate marks cover how the cigar actually performed, so a great-tasting stick with a terrible burn reads honestly a year later.
- An overall rating out of five
- Separate draw, burn, construction and flavour marks, scored on their own
- Your own tasting notes, and flavour notes recorded separately from them
- The strength and the body you actually perceived, which need not match the maker's claim
- How much smoke it threw — light, medium or heavy
- How you cut it: straight, punch, V-cut or crown
- How long it took, in minutes
- The date you smoked it, stored with its time zone so a trip abroad does not shift it
- How long it had been resting first, from the date you started ageing it
- Photos of the cigar, the band or the moment
- Where you smoked it, and which lounge if it was one on the map
- The occasion — a birthday, a round of golf, an ordinary Tuesday
- What you paid and where you bought it
- What you drank or ate alongside it, rated and noted in its own right
- Whether you would buy it again — pre-answered from your rating, and yours to override
The bits it fills in for you
Rate a cigar four or five and "would buy it again" answers itself — because that is what a four means. Change the rating before you save and it follows along.
Touch the toggle yourself, though, and it stops following. Your answer is your answer from then on, and re-opening an old entry never rewrites what you saved.
Public or private, entry by entry
Entries start public — they appear as a community review on that cigar's page — and every entry carries its own switch to change that, before you save it or long after. One setting in your account flips which way new entries start, so you can make private the default for everything you log from then on.
Mark an entry private and the entry is yours: the note, the photo, where you were and the fact that it was you are not shown to anyone. What still travels is the score. Your rating counts toward that cigar's community average and toward the pairing data, without your name or your notes attached — which is exactly why those averages are worth reading, since they reflect everyone who smoked the cigar rather than only the people who published a review.
Why a record beats a memory
The first twenty entries are a diary. The next hundred are data. Once you have logged enough, the journal can answer questions you cannot answer from memory: which wrapper you rate highest, whether you actually prefer the fuller ones you claim to, what you were smoking the last time you rated something a five.
It does some of that for you. Insights reads your entries back and shows how many you have logged, what you average, the wrapper and the brands you keep returning to, the strength you favour and how much of your smoking it accounts for, and the pairing you make most. At the end of the year there is a recap of the same shape, with how the year compared to the one before it.
It is also the input to everything else. Recommendations read your ratings. Your taste profile is built from your notes. Pairings you rate feed what the community sees.
Pair it as you log it
A cigar rarely happens on its own. An entry can be attached to a real product from Liquor Vault, Wine Vault, Beer Vault or Coffee Vault — liquor, cocktails, wine, beer or coffee — rather than a free-text guess at what you were drinking. Cocktails carry the liquor they are built on with them, so an Old Fashioned still counts as bourbon when the data is aggregated.
The pairing gets its own rating out of five and its own notes, kept separate from the cigar's. A superb cigar and a superb whiskey can still be a poor match, and scoring them separately is the only way to record that. You can note what you ate alongside it too.
Common questions
- Is the cigar journal free?
- Yes. Log as many cigars as you like, and every part of an entry is included — the separate draw, burn, construction and flavour marks, your own tasting notes, photos, what you paid, where you smoked it, and the per-entry privacy switch.
- Can I keep my journal private?
- Yes. Entries start public, and you can switch any entry to private or change your account setting so new ones start that way. A private entry is never shown to another member — not the note, the photo or your name. Its rating still counts, anonymously, toward the cigar's community average.
- What if the cigar I smoked is not in the database?
- You can add it. If it is a production cigar the catalogue is missing, it gets reviewed and becomes available to everyone; if it is a genuine one-off like a shop roll, it stays yours alone.
- Can I record more than a star rating?
- Yes, and most of an entry is not the star rating. Draw, burn, construction and flavour are scored separately from the overall mark. Alongside them you can record your own tasting notes and flavour notes, the strength and body you perceived, how much smoke it threw, how you cut it, how long it took, the date and where you were, which lounge if it was one on the map, the occasion, how long the cigar had rested first, what you paid and where you bought it, photos, what you drank or ate with it, and whether you would buy it again.
- Does the journal work on my phone?
- Yes. Cigar Vault runs in any mobile browser and there is an Android app; entries sync to the same account either way.