It’s been three decades since a humidor maker and a chemist from General Mills sat down to engineer better cigar protection, which makes it particularly surprising that only now is industry leader Boveda releasing their first cigar humidor. But it’s here—and it delivers. The simply named “Boveda Humidor” (which launches today) is the first actual humidor from a brand that has probably been in most of the humidors you’ve seen, raided, or owned over the last 20-some years.
Your grandpa’s humidor most likely relied on a sponge in a can (or something similar) to keep his stogies from getting crunch, but in the 1990s, Boveda made a product that could take the guesswork out of how soaked the sponge needed to be to keep tobacco soft but not wet.
Boveda’s innovative “Humidi-Paks” changed that. Their “2-way humidity control packets,” which are filled with a substance that is gel-like when saturated and dries into crunchy crystals as it loses moisture. The result was simple: You could touch the packet, keep your fingers and stogies dry, and still quickly tell whether the humidor was properly humidified or it needed a boost.
This technology is in a lot of other areas these days—Boveda makes its packets at different humidity levels to protect guitars and other instruments against cracking, and they likewise produce packets to keep the smokable assets of an equally regulated plant from crumbling away into keef.
Boveda’s humidor, then, is really just designed to be a well-made humidor that integrates their packet system as easily as possible. And that’s a mission they accomplish. The box itself is beautiful—Spanish cedar on the inside and and a minimalist and stylish design of a matte macassar ebony finish with chrome accents on the exterior. The build quality is impressive—the hinges are responsive without feeling loose or wobbly, and the seal feels crisp and pillowy as the lid closes.
Those are traits that most modern humidors will have, but Boveda differentiates itself with the integration of a lid-attached cedar holder for Humidi-Paks. There are holders on the market for other humidor brands, but they can have the janky appearance of after-market additions. Janky doesn’t bother everyone, but for new smokers in particular, a messy or modified humidor can cause problems, like finding your smokes flavored with superglue from a DIY job of attaching magnets.
The humidor makes climate control easy for newbies—stick packets in the box, and when they feel crunchy, replace them with fresh ones. Boveda offers a subscription service for bricks of their packets, which means no panicked drive to the local smoke shop when you come back from a vacation to find that grabbing a smoke sounds like an autumn walk through the woods.
At $350, Boveda’s humidor is somewhere in the middle of the market—dozens of times more affordable than equally sized Spanish cedar boxes from the likes of Davidoff and Elie Bleu. Those can range in the thousands. But the Boveda Humidor is also two or three times more expensive than some of the affordable wooden models on the market. It also comes in just one size and finish. Options are a category where Boveda will likely always be the loser, even if this first release is followed by four more sizes and a dozen new finishes.
If you’re in the market for a new humidor and you like the aesthetics of this one, it’s definitely a buy. And if you’re looking for a humidor to gift to a new or novice smoker, there’s not a single option more user-friendly on the market right now. But I don’t think Boveda will mind if you wait for more options, or go with another brand entirely. No matter who manufactures your fancy wooden box, I’d still strongly recommend you manage it with Boveda.
G. Clay Whittaker is a Maxim contributor covering lifestyle, whiskey, cannabis and travel. His work has also appeared in Bon Appetit, Men’s Journal, Cigar Aficionado, Playboy and Esquire. Subscribe to his newsletter Drinks & Stuff for cigar-adjacent content, perspectives on drinks, and stuff.