Cigar Mold

I earlier posted, then quickly removed, a rant about Plume versus Mold. Thankfully, my rant received the proper attention, which is to say my bullshit was called, and what I was presenting as Plume was actually revealed to be Mold.

Totally not Plume

As an apology to the /r/cigars community I so love, I went out and purchased a potato-quality microscope with a VGA sensor eyepiece attachment to discern what I was looking at. Sadly, quality is about what you'd expect from the camera, so you're going to have to trust me as I present my findings, which I will back up with observations from the regular optical eyepiece, which obviously had a much clearer picture.

Here we go:

Between 40-80x magnification

Between 40-80x magnification

So these first two picture you're looking at are regular, healthy, leaf taken from an unaffected part of the cigar in question, a Romeo 1875 Numero Dos Tubo. Can't apologize enough for the tough-to-work with quality, and I may back these up with my friend's stereoscope in the near-future, but what I was looking at wasn't far from Butcher's Paper (or Brown Craft Paper), it looked coarse, light shone easily through it, very sort of "fuzzy" in it's quality.

Between 40-80x magnification

This next image is taken from an affected part of the leaf, and pretty clearly shows a sort of "sea" of white fluffy mold. Almost spiderweb like in appearance. So that clears it up, it was definitely mold.

Finally, I took a picture of a piece of mold I removed from the leaf to attempt to get the maximum quality out of my potatoscope.

Between 150-300x magnification

Although it may look slightly crystalline in this fuzzy image, it's actually got that same spider-web like appearance on the regular ocular. Imagine balling up a larger web, and the appearance wouldn't be far-off.

So, again, though science is never completely infallible in it's observation, and barring the possibility of some small insect civilization on this box of RyJ, we're looking at mold, it's pretty clear.

As a final note, please understand that the reason I cannot list the exact magnification of the images is because the digital ocular doesn't list one. The regular eyepiece spans from 10-20x magnification, making the three subjects 40-80, 150-300, and 300-600 power total. Since the camera lists no magnification, I'm forced to list the potential range achieved by the subject alone.

-Ephram Rafael Nadaner

PotatoScope: Fun for the Whole Family!