Cigar Trivia
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49 free Cigar trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On the cigar wrapper colour scale, which of these terms marks the darkest leaf?
Maduro
Maduro marks a very dark brown wrapper, a shade brought on by sun or prolonged fermentation; the colour is no indication of a cigar's strength, and dark leaf tends to add a touch of sweetness.
Q 02The word 'cigar' is thought to derive, via Spanish, from a word in which language?
Mayan
Mayan sikar, 'to smoke rolled tobacco leaves', probably gave Spanish its cigarro, though a rival theory points to cigarra, the cicada, for the shape.
Q 03European explorers first observed cigar smoking among which indigenous people in 1492?
The Taino of Cuba
The Taino of Cuba smoked twisted tobacco leaves wrapped in a palm leaf or maize husk, and their word for the rolls, cohiba, now names the island's flagship cigar brand.
Q 04Which French ambassador to Portugal sent tobacco to the French court in 1560?
Jean Nicot
Jean Nicot, ambassador in Lisbon from 1559, sent tobacco to Catherine de' Medici as a remedy in 1560; the genus Nicotiana and nicotine carry his name.
Q 05Which Connecticut general of the Revolutionary War is believed to have brought Havana cigars home from the Seven Years' War?
Israel Putnam
Israel Putnam, who served in the 1762 British capture of Havana, is said to have returned to Connecticut with a load of Havana cigars and Cuban tobacco seed.
Q 06In 1869 Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his cigar operations from Havana to which US city?
Key West
Key West received Ybor's El Príncipe de Gales factory in 1869 as he left Havana in the turmoil of the Ten Years' War; other Cuban makers followed him, and the town became a cigar-making centre.
Q 07Ybor City, once nicknamed the 'Cigar Capital of the World', is a neighborhood of which Florida city?
Tampa
Tampa absorbed Ybor City, founded by Vicente Martinez Ybor in the 1880s; its cigar workers came mainly from Cuba, Spain and Italy, earning Tampa the nickname 'Cigar City'.
Q 08Roughly how many cigars did Ybor City's factories hand-roll in the peak year of 1929?
500 million
500 million cigars left Ybor City's factories in 1929; then the Depression pushed smokers to cheaper cigarettes and makers to machines, and hand-rolling collapsed.
Q 09What is the name of the crescent-shaped knife a cigar roller uses to shape the leaves?
Chaveta
The chaveta is a crescent of flat steel that the roller uses to cut each wrapper leaf to size and to shape the head, quickly enough to turn out hundreds of near-identical cigars a day.
Q 10Historically, who was employed to entertain workers on a cigar factory floor?
A hired reader
A hired reader, the lector, was engaged by the rollers themselves to read newspapers and novels aloud as they worked; the custom still survives in a number of Cuban cigar factories.
Q 11Which Dominican city in the Cibao valley is the centre of the country's cigar industry?
Santiago de los Caballeros
Santiago de los Caballeros owes its cigar trade to the fertile Cibao valley around it, where much of the country's premium tobacco is grown; rum and cigars are among its leading exports.
Q 12Which magazine shares a publisher with Cigar Aficionado?
Wine Spectator
Wine Spectator's owner, Marvin Shanken, launched Cigar Aficionado in autumn 1992, and the premium-cigar boom that began that year peaked in 1997.
Q 13In cigar terminology, 'capa' is the Spanish word for which part of the cigar?
The outermost leaf
Q 21The traditional way to light a cigar uses a thin strip of wood known as what?
A spill
A spill is lit first from a candle, match or lighter and then used to toast the foot of the cigar; it burns slowly, and some cigar bars use spills more than a foot long.
Q 22Which instrument shows whether a cigar humidor is holding its moisture?
A hygrometer
A hygrometer reads the relative humidity inside, which most humidors hold near 70 percent; drier cigars turn fragile and burn fast, while damper ones burn unevenly.
Q 23Which wood is the classic lining for a humidor?
Spanish cedar
Spanish cedar, in fact a tropical relative of mahogany and no true cedar, lines humidors because it holds moisture without warping and its scented resin deters insects.
Capa is the outermost leaf of the cigar, while the binder beneath it is the capote; the finest capa leaf is grown under gauze canopies for a smooth, thinly veined surface.
Q 14Which filler leaf, from the sun-drenched top of the tobacco plant, is the strongest and spiciest?
Ligero
Ligero means 'light' in Spanish, yet it is the strongest filler: the top leaves get the most sun and grow thickest, and their slow burn puts them in the middle of the bunch.
Q 15A cigar made entirely from tobacco grown in a single country is known in the trade by what name?
Puro
Puro, once simply a Spanish word for a cigar, now means one whose filler, binder and outer leaf all come from a single country, which makes every Cuban cigar a puro.
Q 16A cigar's ring gauge measures its diameter in what unit?
Sixty-fourths of an inch
Ring gauge counts sixty-fourths of an inch, 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
Vitola covers a cigar's length, ring gauge and shape; Cuban factories separate the factory vitola from the commercial name, so one size can carry several brand names.
Q 18Straight-sided cigars with a rounded cap, the benchmark for other formats, are called what?
Parejos
Parejos are straight-sided cigars such as coronas and lonsdales; the shape is the easiest and cheapest to roll, which is why irregular figurados usually cost more.
Q 19Which Cuban brand's range consists only of figurado shapes?
Cuaba
Cuaba, launched in London in 1996, makes only double figurados, tapered at both ends, reviving a shape that was all the rage for Havana cigars at the end of the 19th century.
Q 20Which of these is a standard type of cigar cutter?
Guillotine
The guillotine, a straight single- or double-bladed cutter, is the most common style; punch and V-cut are the other standard ways to open the cap.
Q 24A tiny, perfectly round hole bored in a stored cigar is the mark of which pest?
The tobacco beetle
The tobacco beetle, Lasioderma serricorne, starts as eggs laid in the leaf; if a humidor gets too warm they hatch, and the beetle burrows out through the cigar.
Q 25The expression 'close but no cigar' is thought to come from cigars being given away as prizes where?
Fairground games
Fairground games in the United States are the likeliest origin, though no firm proof survives: stalls gave cigars as prizes, so a player who came close still went home without one.
Q 26Which cigar, a traditional smoke of Burma and India, is cut square at both ends with no cap?
Cheroot
Cheroot cigars are clipped at both ends and need no cutting; long traditional in India and Burma, they became a favourite of the British there during the days of empire.
Q 27Cuban Cohiba was established in 1966 as a private brand supplied exclusively to whom?
Fidel Castro and top officials
Cohiba began in 1966 as a private brand for Fidel Castro and top officials, also serving as diplomatic gifts; it was not sold publicly until 1982.
Q 28Which historical figure does Cohiba's Siglo series of cigars commemorate?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus is honoured by the Línea 1492, launched on the 500th anniversary of his landing; each Siglo size marks one century since, with Siglo VI added in 2002.
Q 29Cohiba tobacco comes from the Vuelta Abajo region of which Cuban province?
Pinar del Río
Pinar del Río, Cuba's westernmost province, holds the Vuelta Abajo; Cohiba takes leaf from a handful of chosen fields there and gives its filler an extra fermentation in barrels for a smoother taste.
Q 30The Montecristo brand takes its name from a novel by which author?
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo is said to have been a favourite on the rolling floor of the Havana factory where the brand began in 1935; the Edmundo size, added in 2004, is named for its hero.