Boveda for Cigars: RH Percentages, Humidor Seasoning, and Getting It Right

A customer came in last week with a brand new wood humidor still in its plastic wrap, a box of cigars in the other hand, ready to load them straight in and call the whole thing done. That is the single most common mistake in cigar storage, and it is an easy one to make, because nothing about a new humidor tells you it is not ready yet. Untreated wood is genuinely dry, and dry wood pulls moisture from whatever is nearby, including your cigars, right from the very start. Skip the seasoning step and you can dry out an expensive box of cigars in the very container meant to protect them. This guide covers the two things that actually matter most: which relative humidity percentage to run for genuine ongoing storage, and precisely how to season a brand new wood humidor the correct way before anything at all goes into it. We carry Boveda's two-way humidity packs, and this is the honest version of how to use them correctly, not just the sales pitch.

Why cigars need stable humidity at all

Cigars are hygroscopic, meaning they constantly absorb and release moisture from whatever environment surrounds them, whether that is a humidor, an open room, or a shirt pocket. That constant exchange is exactly why humidity control matters so much for cigar storage. Too dry, and the wrapper turns brittle, the burn goes hot and uneven, and the tobacco loses the essential oils responsible for flavor and aroma. Too humid, and cigars become spongy and hard to keep lit, and worse, sit inside the humidity range where mold and tobacco beetle eggs can become a real problem. The right relative humidity keeps a cigar's wrapper flexible, its burn even, and its flavor intact, whether you are smoking it next week or aging it for years. Two-way humidity control exists specifically to solve this, since it does not just remove excess moisture the way a simple desiccant would, it also releases moisture back if the environment dries out, holding a stable target automatically in both directions rather than requiring constant manual adjustment.

The percentage landscape

Boveda makes packs at several relative humidity targets, and picking the right one matters, since the number is fixed into the pack rather than adjustable after the fact. Sixty-nine percent RH is Boveda's own stated standard, the most preferred level for premium cigars, and it works across essentially any storage type, wood humidors, acrylic humidors, tupperdors, coolerdors, and travel humidor bags, making it the safe default choice if you are not sure where to start. Sixty-five percent RH runs drier, favored by smokers who prefer a cleaner burn, an easier draw, and who find cigars at the higher end of the range feel slightly spongy; it is also a common choice for long-term aging and for cigars, or climates, more prone to mold at higher moisture levels. Seventy-two percent RH runs wetter, intended for drafty humidors that struggle to hold humidity, for genuinely dry rooms, and for smokers who prefer a fuller, more moisture-forward profile or who are protecting fragile, delicate wrapper leaves. Seventy-five percent RH exists only for extreme dry conditions, high altitude or desert climates where nothing else can keep up, and it is explicitly not meant for long-term aging and should never be used in an airtight container like a tupperdor. Where you land between 65 and 72 is genuinely a matter of personal taste as much as technical correctness, and many experienced cigar collectors settle on a preference only after comparing a couple of levels side by side in their own humidor.

Seasoning a new wood humidor: the step almost everyone skips

This is the single most important thing to get right, and it is the mistake that started this guide. A brand new wood humidor is dry, and dry wood behaves like a sponge, pulling moisture from the nearest available source. If you load cigars straight into an unseasoned humidor, the wood pulls moisture out of your cigars rather than holding a stable environment around them, which can dry out and damage an entire box before you realize what happened. Seasoning solves this by deliberately saturating the wood with moisture first, before any cigars go anywhere near it. This requires a much higher humidity level than ongoing storage does, which is exactly why 84 percent RH exists as its own dedicated category, built specifically to fully charge kiln-dried Spanish cedar and other humidor woods with the moisture they need. Regular maintenance packs at 65, 69, or 72 percent simply do not carry enough moisture volume to saturate dry wood; used for seasoning, they will exhaust themselves within days without ever properly conditioning the humidor, leaving you with a box that still is not ready.

The math behind seasoning

Boveda's own research found that fully seasoning a 100-count wood humidor requires roughly 100 grams of water released into the wood, and each Size 60 pack at 84 percent RH releases approximately 35 grams of moisture. That works out to about four seasoning packs for a 100-count humidor, or two packs for a 50-count humidor, scaled proportionally for other sizes. Place the packs inside the empty humidor, close the lid, and let the wood absorb that moisture for roughly 10 to 14 days. Your cigars should not be inside the humidor during this process; keep them safe elsewhere, such as a sealed tupperdor or travel case with an appropriate maintenance-level pack, while the humidor itself does its work. By the end of the seasoning period, the wood will have absorbed enough moisture to bring the humidor's internal environment to somewhere around 65 percent RH on its own, at which point it is properly conditioned and ready for cigars.

Making the switch

Once seasoning is complete, remove the 84 percent packs entirely, do not leave them in alongside a maintenance pack, and replace them with your chosen ongoing storage level, 65, 69, or 72 percent depending on your preference and your humidor's own tendencies. Only at this point should your cigars actually go into the humidor. Skipping straight from an unseasoned box to cigars, or leaving 84 percent packs in with cigars present, both risk the same problem: humidity levels far outside the safe range for actual tobacco storage, either drying cigars out during an unseasoned start or oversaturating them if 84 percent stays in too long. The seasoning-then-swap sequence, in that order, is what makes the whole system work correctly.

How many packs does your humidor need

For ongoing maintenance once seasoning is done, Boveda's general sizing guidance is roughly one Size 60 pack for every 25 cigars of humidor capacity, moving up to a larger Size 320 pack for bigger humidors rather than using many small packs at once. This is a starting reference rather than an absolute rule, since a very tightly sealed humidor needs less active regulation than a leaky one holding the same cigar count, but it gives you a reasonable place to start. Where you position the pack inside the humidor matters too: placing it away from direct contact with delicate wrapper leaves, often tucked into a corner, a dedicated humidification tray, or beneath a divider, prevents the pack's surface from marking or discoloring a cigar it happens to rest directly against over weeks of contact, while still allowing the pack full exposure to the surrounding air so it can do its job properly. For larger humidors housing a hundred cigars or more, splitting your total pack allocation across two or three locations rather than clustering everything in one spot helps humidity distribute more evenly through the whole box, since a single concentrated source has to work harder to condition cigars sitting farthest away from it. If your humidity readings drift noticeably despite following this guidance, that is usually a sign of a sealing issue with the humidor itself, a warped lid, a worn gasket, or a crack in the wood, rather than a sizing problem with the pack, and it is worth checking those physical details before assuming you simply need more packs than the size calculation calls for.

Wood humidors versus airtight containers

How your storage container holds humidity affects which number you should actually buy. A wood humidor, even a well-built one, is not perfectly airtight, since wood breathes slightly and the lid seal is rarely as tight as synthetic gasket materials achieve, so a wood humidor commonly settles a few percentage points below the pack's stated RH rather than holding exactly at that number. This is part of why some experienced collectors choose a 72 percent pack for a wood humidor specifically, expecting it to settle a bit lower into a more ideal working range once the wood's natural air exchange is accounted for. An airtight container, such as a plastic tupperdor, a Boveda humidor bag, or an acrylic humidor with a proper gasket seal, holds much closer to the pack's exact stated level, since there is little to no air exchange diluting the effect. If you use an airtight container, the number on the pack is close to what you will actually get; if you use a traditional wood humidor, expect the real number to land a bit lower and plan your pack choice accordingly.

Calibrate your hygrometer first

Before trusting any humidity reading, whether from an analog dial gauge or a digital hygrometer, it is worth confirming the instrument itself is accurate, since a surprising number of stock hygrometers that ship inside budget humidors read several points off from the very beginning. A simple calibration check uses a small sealed container with a saturated salt solution, which stabilizes at a known, predictable humidity level regardless of the room around it; placing your hygrometer inside that sealed environment for about 24 hours and comparing the reading against the known reference value tells you exactly how far off your gauge is running, and by how much, in either direction. If your hygrometer reads a few points low or high compared to the reference, you can mentally adjust every future reading by that same offset rather than replacing the instrument outright, though a persistently unreliable analog dial gauge is often worth upgrading to a digital hygrometer for genuinely accurate day-to-day monitoring. Skipping this step means every decision you make afterward, whether to add moisture, whether seasoning is complete, whether your cigars are actually in range, is built on a number that might already be wrong before you even start, which makes the few minutes calibration takes one of the better investments you can make in getting your storage right from day one.

Never mix percentages

This rule applies without exception, and Boveda states it plainly: never combine packs of different RH percentages inside the same container. Two packs pulling toward different targets do not average out to something in between; instead, they work against each other, each trying to push the shared air toward its own number, which produces an unstable, unpredictable environment rather than the steady humidity the system is designed to deliver. If you want to change your storage level, remove the old packs entirely before adding new ones at the different percentage, rather than simply adding the new pack alongside what is already there.

Reading the pack and knowing when to replace it

A Boveda pack tells you how much working life it has left through touch, and learning to read that is more reliable than guessing based on how long it has been in the humidor. A pack still actively regulating humidity feels soft and slightly plump, holding a genuine moisture reserve it can draw on or release as conditions shift. As a pack approaches the end of its useful life, it gradually firms up, eventually feeling hard, stiff, or crystallized, a clear physical signal that it has given up its moisture reserve and can no longer regulate humidity effectively in either direction. In a well-sealed container, a maintenance pack commonly lasts several months before needing replacement, though the exact timeline varies with how airtight your specific humidor or case is and how often it gets opened, since every opening exchanges a bit of conditioned air with the room outside. Rather than replacing on a fixed calendar, a quick squeeze whenever you check your cigars tells you definitively whether the pack is still doing its job or whether it is time for a fresh one, and catching a spent pack before it fully hardens keeps your humidity from drifting unnoticed in the days before you would otherwise think to check it.

Travel cases and smaller storage

Not every cigar storage need involves a full-size wood humidor, and the same principles apply at smaller scale with a couple of practical adjustments worth knowing. Travel humidors, whether a small leather case, a hard-shell puck-style holder, or a resealable plastic tupperdor, generally seal far more tightly than a traditional wood box, which means they behave like the airtight containers described earlier: whatever percentage pack you place inside will hold much closer to its exact stated level, with little of the settling effect a wood humidor shows. This makes travel cases genuinely convenient for testing a new percentage before committing your main collection to it, since you can trial a different RH level in a small case over a week or two and judge the result on a couple of cigars before deciding whether to switch your primary humidor over. For very small quantities, a handful of cigars in a resealable bag with a single appropriately sized pack works perfectly well and does not require the seasoning process at all, since there is no dry wood in the equation pulling moisture away; the seasoning requirement is specific to wood humidors and does not apply to plastic, acrylic, or bag-based storage, which can go straight to a maintenance-level pack from the start. If you travel frequently with cigars, keeping a dedicated small pack in your travel case separate from your main humidor's supply avoids the temptation to borrow a pack from one setup and inadvertently mix percentages between two containers that were previously running consistent, stable levels.

Common mistakes

A handful of errors account for most cigar humidity problems. The first, and the one that prompted this guide, is loading cigars into a brand new wood humidor without seasoning it first, letting the dry wood pull moisture from the cigars themselves. The second is using maintenance-level packs, 65, 69, or 72 percent, to attempt seasoning, when only 84 percent carries enough moisture volume to actually saturate dry wood. The third is leaving cigars in the humidor during the seasoning process rather than storing them safely elsewhere for those 10 to 14 days. The fourth is mixing different RH percentages in one container, producing an unstable result rather than a useful average. The fifth is assuming a wood humidor will hold exactly at the number printed on the pack, when natural air exchange typically settles it a few points lower. And the sixth is picking a percentage based on someone else's recommendation alone rather than your own preference for burn and draw, when the honest answer within the 65 to 72 range genuinely comes down to personal taste. Avoid these six and a Boveda-maintained humidor holds a stable, correct environment with essentially no ongoing effort. Most of these mistakes share a common thread worth remembering: they all involve skipping a step, seasoning, calibration, checking the pack's actual condition, rather than getting a step technically wrong, which is exactly why a methodical, patient approach to a new humidor pays off far more than rushing straight to the part where cigars finally go inside.

Shop Boveda humidity packs

The two Boveda packs we currently stock, both genuinely useful depending on your setup.

Frequently asked questions

Season a new humidor properly before anything goes in it, choose a maintenance percentage that fits your storage type and your own preference, and never mix percentages in the same container. Shop the packs we stock above, sized to your humidor and ready to go.

For informational purposes only. This article reflects general guidance on humidity control for cigar storage and is not a substitute for the manufacturer's own instructions. Tobacco products are intended for use by adults of legal age in their jurisdiction.