I'd appreciate some thoughts on kilning.
My kiln is outdoors, and here in Finland the temperature can easily drop to -10 C (14 F) or even lower in December, when I'll still have tobacco in the kiln.
Because the outside temperature gets so low, I can't really avoid condensation if I humidify the whole kiln. My kiln isn't completely airtight, and there are some small thermal bridges anyway: screws, a window with little insulation, cable pass-throughs, etc.
Last year I kilned some Burley in watertight glass jars with 72% Bovedas inside, without humidifying the kiln itself at all. Once a week I opened the jars, lightly moistened the leaves and moved them around a bit. The leaves were folded inside the jars, and naturally they suffered a little from all the handling. They were going to become pipe tobacco anyway, so it didn't really matter. Results were good.
This year I'm trying to kiln cigar tobacco. I'd like to keep the leaves whole, straight and undamaged, while still avoiding humidifying the air inside the kiln.
Has anyone here tried something like this: putting whole leaves inside a vacuum bag - not vacuumed, not heat-sealed, but with the open end closed as tightly as possible - and then maintaining the humidity only inside the bag?
This would also save a lot of space compared to glass jars, since I could simply stack the bags on top of each other in the kiln. At the same time, I could put the different leaf types from each variety into their own bags right from the start, and then store them in the same bags afterwards.
Does this sound like a reasonable idea, or is this a road to disaster?
Another approach would be to frog-leg the leaves first, moisten them, fold them once lengthwise, then roll a stack of leaves into a bundle and put it in a glass jar. Long-term storage would then be a separate step.
