Quarantining Cigars

Setharsis said:
Just try to bag up your sticks in plastic wrap and ziploc bags.  It's relatively inert but it might cause some acidification of any moisture in the sticks.
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Some very wise advice indeed. CO2 dissolved in water = carbonic acid.
 
And no I'm not a chemist, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
 
PS I had a recent problem with a VSG Spell Bound that had to be put down ( :( ) due to some larvae activity. Luckily my FIL has a freezer that can achieve -20F (not quite -40, but it kills the active larvae and bugs anyway if not the eggs) so I froze them in my freezer first, then transferred them under ice to his freezer where they stayed for 48 hours. Bringing them up back up to temperature in a refrigerator inside an insulated bag worked fine, all of the sticks looked intact and the ones I smoked seemed just as good as before. I should note that I keep my sticks right around 70RH (and sometimes higher, hence the problem... but we won't get into that), so they could probably benefit from whatever drying they experienced in the freezer anyway (they were in a ziploc bag).
 
Well I just ran the sticks through the freezing/thawing process and put them in the general population.  Hopefully they didn't have any critters in them to begin with. 
 
Thanks for the ideas, guidance, and comments. 
 
I may get some Dry Ice this weekend. I have the perfect sticks for this experiment. No sign of beetle infestation. If the -40 is the baseline, and dry ice goes under -100, then I think it is safe to assume that all eggs, if present, would be killed. I guess what we will determine, at least, is the the sticks survive. I'll leave them in the garage after thawing, with a 65% boveda. I would think that would initiate any hatching. Putting it in my Calendar. Feel free to remind me in a few weeks.
 
Curious as to if anyone ever tried the Dry Ice experiment? I'd be interested to know! Obviously this is a 2 year old post, but I'm considering trying it out sometime as long as no one ruined their batch of cigars!
 
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