Prepper question - Storing tobacco

One of the local smoke shops has recently started selling bulk pipe tobacco in large plastic bags. Bu "bulk" I mean 5 pound bags, which amounts to about a cubic foot.

Being a smoker for too long (I know! I know!) and being somewhat into the prepper/survivalist mentality, I bought one.

My question is about what I can do to keep it at the proper humidity. Thinking about transferring it to large airtight plastic containers and putting in like a moist paper towel inside a plastic sandwich bag, that sort of thing.

Ideas and suggestions would be appreciated, especially personal experience, like folks who store cigars, etc.

Store bought cigarettes are a very refined product, a well preserved pack in a post collapse world would be very elegant and prestigious indeed, high quality bargaining.

I had a few packs of luckys that were at least 20 years old and may have been much older ( I think they were much older) and at 2:00am when they had had a few drinks and were out of smokes, not a single guest ever commented on them as old or stale, a couple of people when prodded could detect that they seemed a little less than fresh but they had no complaints.

Use glass canning jars; they are not expensive and you can get them in different sizes, from half pint to gallon size.
Just pretreat the jars the same way you would for canning peaches or pears; drop in one of those oxygen absorbing packets that are used for dehydrated foods and seeds. Slap on the lid while the gum is still soft, tighten the ring and store in a cool dry place. I keep peaches, pears, sliced apples and all manner of preserved fruit and vegetables for years like this. Tastes as good as the day it went into the jars and I ain’t dead yet. Been canning my own harvest for several years now and love it. Only use the oxygen absorbent packets on dry goods; wouldn’t work to well on apple sauce or canned peaches now would it. I would recommend every body learn how to can and pickle, its not difficult, its a lot of fun (hard work to sometimes) and you get to eat it when you want to.

Again with the Cubans; I gave up on them years ago. People are so fixated on them, which is why 90% are fake and yet they sell to enthusiastic buyers.

Like everything that is manufactured - especially handmade things - quality of Cuban-manufactured cigars and Cuban tobacco can vary.

There is the very best, the pretty good, the ok and “everything else”.

Just because a Cigar is made from pre-embargo Cuban tobacco that was found in a warehouse and somehow acquired, IMHO there is no guarantee the resulting cigars will be the best of the best. I’ve had a few “pre-embargo” and they were nothing to write home about.

Like any product that is aged, the quality after aging is first limited by the quality of the raw material before aging. In the same way that JFK made sure that he had stocked up prior signing the embargo, if that “mystery” tobacco had been of superior quality, it would have somehow “disappeared” at the outset and been made into cigars. IMHO, only lower quality tobacco would be abandoned in the face of a coming embargo, especially if there was a large quantity.

IMHO, the best Cubans are in a class by themselves but they’re a very rare treat.

On the topic of aging, regarding non-Cubans, starting at about 2-3 years properly kept in an Elie Bleu humidor even a rather standard cigar will have a dramatically better taste compared to the day it went in. Aging really brings out the best of tobacco. There are some smokers who smoke long-aged cigars exclusively. But even the Elie Bleu can not make a bad-tasting tobacco taste good.

Thanks to all the FReepers for their recommendations!

What I did was this:
I have a bunch of large, sealable plastic bags that smaller quantities of the tobacco come in. So I took four of those, put about 12 ozs. in each, then took the four and put them (sealed, of course) back into the large plastic bag the original came in. But before I sealed it, I took a paper towel, wet it and smushed it up, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and put it in the bag.

The remaining amount was enough to fill a 1 1/2 gallon plastic jug, so it went in there with it’s own towel/foil thingie.

I will check it on occasion just to make sure it’s not getting moldy or whatever, but I very, very much doubt there is enough water in there to make it damp. Just enough to keep it from drying out and getting brittle.

Smoke em if you got em!!

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