Machine Made vs. Hand Rolled

[Gonz]

So this buddy of mine was over and I was giving him a tour of my coolidor when he looked at the foot of one of my cigars and claimed that it was machine made, and that he could tell by the way the tobacco looked, something about how it spiraled? I'm pretty sure he doesn't have any idea what he's talking about, and was just trying to play the "Look at me, I'm a bigshot who smuggles real cubans from Jamaica" card.

But I like to be sure of myself before I call BS on someone, so I thought I'd put it out to the pros. Is there a difference in what the tobacco looks like at the foot of the cigar depending on whether or not it was hand-rolled or machine-made? I've never really examined a machine-made cigar before and can't say. Can anyone post any photos possibly showing what this guy thought he was talking about?

Thanks!

 

[Ginseng]

I'm pretty confident that you can call "bullshit" on this one.

I'm too busy to take a dozen photos, size, arrange and post but I examined about 10 or 11 different machine-made and quite a few more totalmente a mano cigars and IMO it is impossible to tell which is which with any reliability. If you examine a pile of TaM cigars, you'll see that the bunching can vary wildly in appearance from my preferred arrangement (moderately dense Habana chaos) to heavily booked and tightly packed. While the heavily booked forms are almost exlusive to long-filler TaM sticks, if you get a loose, chaotic roll, it'll look substantially like even a mixed-filler machine-made.

IMO, overall odds are 50-50 on choosing the right method of manufacture.

Wilkey