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I was reading the recent thread "Your Taste for Cigars" and it got me thinking. It wasn't the first or the most comprehensive thread to bring up the issue of breaking up the experience of a cigar into thirds, but it was the one that got me to finally wonder, "is there really such a thing as three stages of smoking development?" Or, was this simply a convenient framework for evaluating the smoking experience? Well, I'm tending toward the latter explanation as the the current state of affairs, most likely based to some degree actual experience. By this, I mean that a cigar clearly changes in character from freshly lit to nub, but why three stages? Why not top half and bottom half, or twelfths? Well, I'm proposing that it's nothing more than convenience. One stage is clearly too few and five, well, that's too many, especially for something as small as a minutos. So three is a good compromise and is the minimal quantity that covers the conceptual landmarks beginning, middle, end. Okay, so that was the easy part. My real question is a bit more thought provoking. And that is, should we force evaluation into thirds? Or, should we make note of the character changes as a measure of the cigar? That is, stages of transition as a response variable and not a rigid framework. What would be the benefit of such an approach? Well, perhaps not much more than simply letting the cigar tell the smoker where the breaks are. But, if we allow that perhaps some characteristic of the blend can affect how many and where changes take place, maybe that information can be used as a diagnostic or probe. Like more seco, more transitions and of a particular progression. More ligero, less dramatic transitions and fewer detected. What do you guys think? Just noodling out here. Wilkey