50 free Cigar trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
45 free Cigar trivia questions with answers. Cigars come with more lore than almost any other indulgence, and this quiz digs into it. Forty-five questions cover how a cigar is built from filler, binder and wrapper, what a ring gauge measures, why humidors are lined with cedar, and where the phrase 'close but no cigar' comes from. The brand questions take you through Cohiba's origins as Fidel Castro's private smoke, the novel that named Montecristo, the Shakespeare play behind Romeo y Julieta and the banker who founded H. Upmann. There is history too: the Taino people Columbus's scouts saw smoking in 1492, Ybor City's rise as the Cigar Capital of the World, the invention of the cigar band in the 1830s and the night before John F. Kennedy signed the Cuban embargo. Easy questions suit anyone who has ever been handed a cigar at a wedding; the hard ones are for aficionados who know their volado from their ligero. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on cigars, the major brands and the people behind them, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of the three components of a modern cigar is usually made from the highest-quality leaf?
The wrapper
Its color is so important that it is often used to describe the whole cigar, from claro to oscuro.
Q 02The word 'cigar' ultimately derives from a word in which language?
Mayan
The English word only came into general use in 1730, by way of the Spanish 'cigarro'.
Q 03European explorers first observed cigar smoking among which indigenous people in 1492?
The Taino of Cuba
Bartolomé de las Casas described Columbus's scouts finding men who sucked smoke from dry herbs wrapped in a leaf, which the locals called tabacos.
Q 04Which French ambassador, who spread tobacco to France, gave his name to nicotine?
Jean Nicot
Sir Walter Raleigh's voyages did the same job for Britain, where pipes rather than cigars caught on first.
Q 05Which Revolutionary War general is believed to have brought Havana cigars home from the Seven Years' War?
Israel Putnam
He also brought Cuban tobacco seeds and planted them near Hartford, reportedly leading to the famous shade-grown Connecticut wrapper.
Q 06In 1869 Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his cigar operations from Havana to which US city?
Key West
He was escaping the turmoil of the Ten Years' War, and other manufacturers followed him.
Q 07Ybor City, once nicknamed the 'Cigar Capital of the World', is a neighborhood of which Florida city?
Tampa
Its cigar workers came mainly from Cuba, Spain and Italy, and the whole city picked up the nickname 'Cigar City'.
Q 08Roughly how many 'clear Havana' cigars did Ybor City and West Tampa roll in their 1929 peak year?
Over 500 million
At its height the district had 150 cigar factories, but nearly all had closed by the early 1930s.
Q 09What is the name of the crescent-shaped knife a cigar roller uses to shape the leaves?
Chaveta
An experienced roller can turn out hundreds of nearly identical cigars in a day.
Q 10Historically, who was employed to entertain workers on a cigar factory floor?
A hired reader
The practice survives in some Cuban factories, and the Montecristo brand was named after a novel the readers supposedly favored.
Q 11Per Cigar Aficionado, which country's makers produce 44% of the world's most traded cigars?
Dominican makers
The town of Tamboril in Santiago province claims the modern title of Cigar Capital of the World.
Q 12In which year did Cigar Aficionado magazine launch?
1992
Publisher Marvin Shanken, who also owns Wine Spectator, surveyed more than 1,300 cigar smokers before launching it.
Q 13In cigar terminology, 'capa' is the Spanish word for which part of the cigar?
The outermost leaf
The binder is the capote, and wrappers are often grown under gauze canopies to produce a smooth, thinly veined leaf.
Q 21The traditional way to light a cigar uses a splinter of cedar known as what?
A spill
Some cigars come in thin cedar sleeves that can be used the same way.
Q 22At roughly what relative humidity are most cigars best stored?
65-70%
Dry cigars turn fragile and burn fast, while damp ones burn unevenly and pick up an acidic taste.
Q 23Which wood is the classic lining for a humidor?
Spanish cedar
Without a humidor, cigars take on the surrounding humidity within two or three days.
Q 24The tobacco beetle, one of the two most damaging pests to the cigar industry, has what scientific name?
Q 14Which filler leaf, from the sun-drenched top of the tobacco plant, is the strongest and spiciest?
Ligero
Because it burns slowly it is always folded into the middle of the filler bunch.
Q 15A cigar made entirely from tobacco grown in a single country is known in the trade by what name?
Puro
It comes from the Spanish word for 'pure', and applies to filler, binder and wrapper alike.
Q 16A cigar's ring gauge measures its diameter in what unit?
Sixty-fourths of an inch
Length is given in plain inches, so a 7 by 47 cigar is seven inches long and 47/64 of an inch across.
Q 17What is the collective term for a cigar's size and shape?
Vitola
Cuban brands distinguish the commercial name from the factory name of the same size, like Julieta No. 2 for a Churchill.
Q 18Straight-sided cigars with a rounded cap, the benchmark for other formats, are called what?
Parejos
Irregular shapes like torpedoes and pyramids are figurados, which were the most popular shapes in the 19th century.
Q 19Which Cuban brand's range consists only of figurado shapes?
Cuaba
Figurados had all but disappeared by the 1930s before a modest revival among today's makers.
Q 20Which of these is a standard type of cigar cutter?
Guillotine
Punch and V-cut are the other common styles, and the cap must be cut or pierced before smoking.
Lasioderma serricorne
Ephestia elutella is the tobacco moth, the other great enemy of stored leaf.
Q 25The expression 'close but no cigar' comes from cigars being given away as prizes where?
Fairground games
Cigars are also handed out to mark births, graduations and promotions.
Q 26In which year did US cigar consumption peak at 13.8 billion during the 'cigar boom'?
2012
Consumption had been 6.2 billion in 2000 and slid back to 11.4 billion by 2015.
Q 27Cuban Cohiba was established in 1966 as a private brand supplied exclusively to whom?
Fidel Castro and top officials
It was not sold to the public until 1982, when it launched abroad alongside the World Cup in Spain.
Q 28Cohiba's Línea 1492, with sizes named Siglo I through Siglo VI, commemorates whom?
Christopher Columbus
Each 'siglo' marks a century since his voyage, with the Siglo VI added in 2002.
Q 29Cohiba tobacco comes from the Vuelta Abajo region of which Cuban province?
Pinar del Río
Just ten carefully chosen fields, about 700 acres in all, supplied the brand in the early 1990s.
Q 30The Montecristo brand takes its name from a novel by which author?
Alexandre Dumas
The Edmundo size, added in 2004, is named for the book's hero Edmond Dantès.