Buy two tins of the same blend — one to smoke now, one to forget about for a few years — and you have started a cellar. It is one of the quiet pleasures of the hobby: a cupboard that slowly turns into a small library. The trouble is that British houses are not especially kind to tobacco. Damp winters, warm kitchens and the odd heatwave all work against you, and the difference between leaf that ages beautifully and leaf that turns musty usually comes down to a handful of decisions made on the day a tin is opened.

Glass, and why it beats almost everything else

For anything already opened, glass is the default answer. Nothing exotic is required: a preserving jar with a rubber gasket, or a screw-band jar from a hardware shop or supermarket, will do the job for years. What matters is that the seal is sound, the material imparts no smell of its own, and you can see what is happening inside without disturbing it.

• A gasket in good condition. Rubber perishes and hardens; replace it if it has flattened or cracked.
• Screw bands that sit flat and grip evenly, and no chips or hairline cracks in the rim.
• A jar roughly matched to the contents. As a rough guide, 50g of ribbon cut will fill a jar of about 500ml; flakes and plugs pack tighter and take less room.
• A centimetre or so of headspace. Pack it in, but do not cram it against the lid.

Plastic tubs and sandwich boxes are fine for a week or two and poor beyond that. They are seldom truly airtight, and some plastics pass on a faint taste that is very hard to shift once it is in the leaf. Mylar bags with a heat seal work well for bulk — a kilogram of ribbon, say — but you cannot inspect the contents without opening them, which rather defeats the point of long-term storage.

Tins: when to leave them alone

An unopened tin is a sealed environment, and there is no reason to interfere with it. Round screw-top tins are generally reliable and will sit happily for years. The squarer, flatter tins are more variable; some are excellent, others have a reputation for losing their seal over time. Check yours for dents, rust around the seams and a lid that shifts or lifts. If a tin feels suspicious, jar the contents and label them — you have lost nothing but the tin.

Once opened, a tin becomes a short-term container. The lid is a friction fit, not a seal, and the tobacco inside will dry steadily. If you expect to finish it within two or three weeks, leave it where it is. If it is going to sit for longer, move it to glass the same day.

Pouches and bulk bags

Sealed pouches are designed for the shop shelf, not for a decade in a cupboard. They will hold for a year or two; beyond that, transfer the contents to jars. Bulk tobacco bought loose should be jarred immediately, in portions you can open one at a time rather than one enormous jar you keep disturbing.

Humidity: the number worth watching

Pipe tobacco smokes best when it is pliable but not damp — a relative humidity somewhere around 65 to 70 per cent is the usual target. Too dry and it crumbles, burns hot and tastes harsh. Too damp and you get gurgle, a wet heel in the bowl and a tongue that complains for the rest of the evening.

The important thing to understand is that a sealed jar does not create humidity; it only stops humidity changing quickly. Tobacco goes in at the right moisture and stays there. Test a ribbon by pinching it between finger and thumb: it should hold together for a moment and then spring apart. A flake should bend without snapping.

If it is too dry

Rehydrate slowly and in stages. A clean piece of terracotta soaked in distilled water, or a humidity pack rated at 62 or 69 per cent, left in the jar for a few days, will usually bring it back. Use distilled water rather than tap water, which carries minerals and chlorine. Check daily; it is very easy to overshoot, and then you are waiting a fortnight for it to dry back down.

If it is too damp

Leave the jar open for an hour or two in a dry, well-ventilated room, out of direct sun and away from radiators. Resist the old trick of dropping in apple slices or orange peel — fruit introduces moisture you cannot control and gives mould a helping hand.

Where to keep it

Cool, dark and stable beats clever. A cupboard away from outside walls, a spare room, the back of a wardrobe: anywhere that stays roughly between 18 and 21°C with little variation. Avoid lofts, sheds and garages, which swing from frost to heat, and keep jars out of kitchens, bathrooms and airing cupboards, where warm damp air does its work. Direct sunlight degrades the leaf and heats the glass.

A cheap hygrometer is a useful toy rather than a scientific instrument; they drift and vary. Trust your fingers on the tobacco more than the dial. Note also that a "cellar" in this hobby means a cupboard, not a basement — which is fortunate, since few of us have one.

Labels, notes and rotation

Unlabelled jars are the great regret of every pipe smoker who has been at this a few years. Write on the jar, not on a scrap of paper tucked beside it: blend name, weight, date acquired, date opened, and whether it came out of a tin or a bulk bag. Masking tape and a pencil work well and can be lifted off; permanent marker is permanent.

Keep a simple running list — a notebook or a spreadsheet — and glance at it before you open anything. Then set a habit of rotating the stock twice a year, using the oldest first and working forward.

Mould, bloom and the things that are not mould

The good news is that most white dust on aged tobacco is harmless. Bloom, sometimes called plume, is crystalline, catches the light, sits on the surface of the leaf and does not smear when you rub it. It is a normal part of ageing, particularly with Virginias and flakes.

Mould is different. Look for a fuzzy, thread-like growth, often grey-green or black, that spreads through the leaf rather than sitting on it. It smells damp and musty, and the tobacco around it may be clumped and unnaturally warm. If you find it, throw that tobacco away. Do not smoke it, do not cut out the affected patch and keep the rest, and do not try to dry it out and hope. Wash the jar in hot soapy water, dry it thoroughly, air it, and start again — glass is cheap and your lungs are not.

If instead you find small, perfectly round holes and a fine powdery dust, you may be looking at insect activity. Quarantine that jar well away from everything else and decide whether the contents are worth the risk.

A simple routine that works

When a new tin arrives, make one decision: smoking it soon, or storing it? Soon means leave it in the tin and work through it. Storing means jar it, label it and put it in the cupboard. When you open a jar, check it before you fill a pipe — a quick sniff and a glance costs nothing and tells you most of what you need to know. Twice a year, empty the cupboard shelf by shelf, test the seals, feel the tobacco and reorder the oldest to the front. Do that and your cellar will quietly improve while you get on with smoking.

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