# From Freakout to Satisfaction over… - The Lounge Group

I was given this cigar as a gift and was told it was primed and ready to go. The person who had it said was properly humidified, rated 93 and was one ‘hell of a stick’. Posted in The Lounge by Gindy on January 22 2024 9:42:56 AM

- **Group:** [The Lounge Group](https://www.cigarworld.com/groups/the-lounge/)
- **Posted by:** Gindy
- **Date:** January 22, 2024

I was given this cigar as a gift and was told it was primed and ready to go. The person who had it said was properly humidified, rated 93 and was one ‘hell of a stick’.

I had the perfect day to kick up my feet and spend the next two hours doing absolutely nothing…

And then I pulled it out of the cellophane and stared at it in disbelief.

Mold. Little white-ish dots all over it, like tiny crystals.

I’m relatively new to the game so this was my first time seeing something abnormal on a cigar that I owned (even though you hear stories…)

Can I smoke it? That was the one question I sat with for a few minutes.

Do I toss it and tell him I smoked it and it was good?

Do I tell him he gave me a crappy cigar?

So I did what any normal human being would do – I looked it up on the internet.

One of the first googlizations that came up was from *this* site entitled: An Expert Guide to Cigar Mold

https://www.cigarworld.com/education/an-expert-guide-to-cigar-mold/

So then I learned about Plume (or Bloom).

The picture doesn’t do it justice and I wish I would have zoomed in for educational purposes, but below is the pic from the cigar.

It met all of the criteria of Plume over Mold.

I went from frustrated and ready to toss a bad stick to realizing it was primed and ready to go.

It was a hell of a stick and worth every point of the 93.