Category Archives: Contest

by Craig Vanderslice | July 24, 2019 · 9:18 am

Contest: Welcome Fox Cigars Episode One!

We’re getting back to the old days for a while, the good old days of CigarCraig giveaways! For those of you who may not recall, search back through the archives at the months of December from about 2011 through 2015 and you’ll see where I used to do ridiculous giveaways for 12, 13 sometimes 14 days straight! It was a hoot! It got difficult for several reasons, some personal and some logistical, so I scaled it back. It’s time to relive some of the glory days! We have something to celebrate, and that is welcoming a new member to the CigarCraig family, Fox Cigars. I’ve been following these guys for a while, I’ve seen friends talk about their events in Arizona, and followed them on social media. I don’t put links on my site that I don’t believe in and patronize, and I never solicit at all, so an ad or link you can trust, and these guys are top notch. So let’s extend a laurel, and hearty handshake, to Fox Cigars!

Here’s the contest part! Fox Cigars has provided some goodies for giveaways! First up is some great stuff from Perdomo! There’s a Lot 23 cap, a really nice quad jet Vertigo lighter, and a Connecticut four-pack, which includes a 20th Anniversary, a Habano Connecticut a Champagne, and a Lot 23 (which I didn’t realize was Connecticut, I learned something today!). I just smoked the 20th Anniversary Connecticut a few weeks ago and loved it, and that lighter is super cool.

So, leave a comment to enter! I’m going to post this on Instagram, and I’m going to include comments on that post as well, just to make my life more difficult, so you can get two chances. I slipped an obscure movie reference in above, so amuse me by pointing that out for extra credit. As usual, you must be of legal smoking age in your jurisdiction to win (and even that’s getting to be a PITA these days!), one entry per person (per site). I’ll select a winner next Wednesday, July 31, 2019. Thanks to Rob at Fox Cigars!

That’s all for today, until the next time,

CigarCraig

36 Comments

Filed under Contest

Tagged as cigar, cigars, Contest, Fox Cigars, Perdomo, Vertigo

by Craig Vanderslice | July 7, 2019 · 9:53 am

A Couple of Shop Visit, a Couple of Cigars and a Contest Winner!

Happy Sunday! I suppose it’s the end of a holiday weekend for a lot of people, I had Thursday off, and stopped into the CigarCigars shop in the King of Prussia Mall and picked up a couple cigars, one of which I smoked later to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Sure, I have plenty of natural Padron 1964 Anniversary Exclusivos, but I hadn’t had a Maduro in quite some time, so I picked one up. My wife spied a Foundry Compounds, Elements and Musings Uranium box with two cigars left in it, so I bought them and got the box. I’m pretty sure I’ve smoked Uranium before, although I don’t smoke many 7″ x 70s. The artwork is cool and I’ll rig a light in the box and it’ll be a nice shelf piece. Gotta give Mike Giannini credit for creative design! So my wife got a ring from Tiffany, and I got some cigars, it was a good day. The Exclusivo was exceptional, of course. I remember smoking my first one probably 20 years ago and they haven’t changed.

Friday evening I took a ride up to Suburban Cigar Lounge in Mount Penn, PA, which is near Reading. This is a really nice lounge run by Gary, over top of what is, by all reports, a very nice restaurant, which, if I’m not mistaken, his wife runs. I went to meet up with Boston Jimmie, of Stogie Press fame, who took his sweet time showing up. If you advertise that you’re going to be someplace from 7-10, showing up at 8:30 is not acceptable, I don’t care how things are done in Florida. 😜Anyway, Gary has a nice lounge with a friendly clientele, and his humidor has a modest but diverse selection from which I purchased some Alec Bradley Magic Toast Gordos, and RoMaCraft Aquitaine Mode 5s, and lit up a Magic Toast. I love this Magic Toast, it’s my kinda smoke. The dark, oily Honduran wrapper is beautiful, and the flavor is equally dark and lush. I smoked a Mode 5 next, and while I prefer the CroMagnon, the Aquitaine is damn tasty. This is a great example of how the wrapper can completely change the flavor of a cigar, as the wrapper is the only difference between the CroMagnon and Aquitaine lines. Jimmie finally showed up and hung out for a while. I hadn’t seen him since the 2017 IPCPR show, so it was nice seeing him again. Suburban Cigar Lounge is a great place to hang out of you find yourself in the area. I’m sorry I didn’t let long time reader Corey know I was going!

Last night I smoked the 2Guys Smokeshop exclusive Pistoff Kristoff Firecracker. Every year they do a special Firecracker release, last year it was the Mi Querida, prior to that it was the Fratello. I’ve managed to smoke a bunch of them, except for the original ones. It’s a small format, 3½ x 50, in a stronger blend. This was the second Pistoff Firecracker I smoked and I thought it was very good. I’m OK with the Pistoff blend to begin with, so I figured I’d be OK with this, and if I wasn’t, it wasn’t going to be a large time commitment. I do, generally, get an hour out of the Firecrackers, smoking them slowly. Because of the closed foot, a trademark of Kristoff, and usually a Firecracker trait, it starts with a blast of wrapper flavor, and some concern that the draw will be tight, once the wrapper burns, this one opens up to a perfect draw and has a good, bold flavor. It was strong, but well balanced. It looks like these are sold out, as is the case with most of the limited Firecrackers, but often the have second runs, and I would recommend these and others if you like small, strong cigars. They have all been exceptional in my opinion.

Contest

It’s time to select a winner in last weeks contest. To recap, I am giving away some great, in my opinion, Don Juan Calavera cigars from Danli Honduras Tabaco (from my own humidor, to protect the innocent), a Herics Cigar Tape, and a Cigar Prop and Light Bleed Tool from CigarProp.com. It’s possible some other goodies could fall into the box while I’m packing it up. There were 42 entries, and according to the random number generator, the winner is Bob Langmaid! I seems like Bob wins everything all the time, but I could only find one instance of him winning one of my contests, and that was almost 4 years ago. I’d rather have someone who hasn’t won before win, but Bob’s name came up, and he’s been fanatically religious about entering my contests for many years, so fair is fair! Please send me your address Bob!

That’s all for today, until the next time,

CigarCraig

6 Comments

Filed under Contest, Review, Stores

Tagged as 2 Guys Smokeshop, Alec Bradley, cigar, Cigar Prop, cigar store, CigarCigars, cigars, Contest, DOn Juan Calavera, Firecracker, Foundry, Kristoff, padron, Pistof, RoMaCraft, Suburban Cigar Lounge, Uranium

by Craig Vanderslice | June 30, 2019 · 7:10 am

CigarCraig Contest! Don Juan Calavera Cigars, Cigar Prop and Cigar Tape, and a Rant

Since IPCPR is in full swing (scroll down for the rant), and I have a full physical inventory at work tonight that has been taking up a lot of my time this week, I figure it would be a great time to have a contest. I also was anxious to share some of these Don Juan Calaveras cigars, and I always like sharing my buddy Kevin’s Cigar Props and Lighter Bleed Tools. Now, the Cigar Prop and Lighter Bleed Tool are Cigar Prop’s legacy products! Kevin has been expanding his product offerings with some really unique and different materials lately, but I’m old school and love the traditional materials. Read on for the contest details:

Included (for now, you never know what else I might add), are two each of the Don Juan Calavera in Sumatra and Maduro from Danli Handuras Tabacos. You can read my thoughts on these cigars here. They have recently added an English translation to their website, and Their cigars run $175 a box of 20 and can be bought directly from them by contacting them through their website or Facebook page. So you can check to see if they are definitely 6″x52, I’m including a Herics Cigar Tape measuring tape to use to measure cigars. I reviewed this handy item here. Of course, you’ll want to Give Your Cigars the Props they Deserve© with an original Cigar Prop from CigarProp.com, and you’ll also want to treat your butane lighters right by using the CigarProp Lighter Bleed Tool every time you fill your lighter. I use the Bleed tool all the time, it’s preferable to jamming some foreign object like a screwdriver into the fill valve of your expensive lighter and risking damage to it and ruining your lighter as it’s purpose built to do the job. I can’t fathom not using one of these. I think Kevin would have sent me more stuff to give away if I’d have asked him, maybe for the next giveaway 😉, but I had these here and I don’t like to ask. So, leave a comment on this post for a chance to win, and I’ll select a winner at random next Sunday, July 7, 2019. Muchos Gracias to Danli Honduras Tabacos, Cigar Prop, and Herics for the goodies in this contest!

A Little Rant

I have to do a little IPCPR rant. I relinquished my IPCPR Media membership several years ago for a couple of reasons. I was a member in good standing for five years, which means I paid my dues, which were the same as the dues would be if I owned a retail store. A retail store owner received more benefits for that membership, and the trade show admission is always positioned as free with your membership. Given that there are no real benefits of membership to the media other than trade show admission, this translates to me as an expensive trade show ticket. Travel expenses, time off work, I spent a lot of years busting my ass running around for very little return on investment, and quite a bit of frustration from the organization I was spending time, money and effort trying to promote. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed myself to some extent, and love spending time with a great many friends I’ve met in the cigar industry, but it wore me down so I no longer felt the desire to spend my vacations covering the IPCPR show. I still receive e-mails from the IPCPR, and the day before the show started I receive an e-mail addressed to “Our Valued Media Members” asking that we (the media) make appointments and limit interviews and try to do interviews outside of the show hours. Basically they are saying that the retail members are there to do business with the manufacturer/distributor members, so we don’t want the media members getting in the way of that. OK, now, if the IPCPR were issuing press passes to the media for free entry to the show (like many other trade organizations), I wouldn’t have a problem with this request, a day before the show is stupid, we’re supposed to make appointments now?. The time for that was months ago, when, by the way, those of us who have done this before had already made our appointments. They are now asking paying members to not do the only business that they are able to do on the show floor. There is zero chance to do interviews after the show floor closes with any but a few cigar people. After a long day on the show floor, the exhibitors just want to go to their rooms and decompress, clean up and get ready for the long night ahead, and maybe get some rest for the long next day. They aren’t looking forward to a group of camera wielding cigar media people swarming the exits ready to pounce TMZ style because they are discouraged from doing the business that they are paying to do on the show floor. I know a few manufacturers who look forward to the show specifically to connect with the media. It’s just one more blatant slap in the face of media by the IPCPR, who hasn’t wanted them there from the get go, and only tolerated those who ponied up the cash, as long as they toed the line. I was a proud member for several years, and fought with them for a lot of privileges, but none of it was worth the aggravation, it seems. It might be just as valuable for me to go to Vegas while the show is underway and hang out at the Circle Bar in the Venetian after show hours, or go to the Tobacco Plus Expo next year. I guess that wasn’t that little of a rant…

That’s all for today, until the next time,

CigarCraig

45 Comments

Filed under Contest, Editorial

Tagged as cigar, Cigar Prop, cigars, Contest, DOn Juan Calavera, Herics, IPCPR

by CigarCraig | December 30, 2018 · 9:07 am

Happy New Year From CigarCraig and E.P.Carrillo Contest Winner Announcement!

Tomorrow is New Years Eve, and I hope everyone has safe and fun plans, and great cigars picked out. I have to work today and tomorrow, so tomorrow night will be a quite night at home. I’m going to select a nice cigar to relax with on the porch, much like any other evening. It might be something from the rare and unusual part of the humidor, this year has been a weird one for me on a personal level. I’m not quite sure how I want to celebrate it yet! Anyway, as I generally do around this time if year, I’ve spent the last week or so smoking cigars I’ve wanted to smoke with little regard for presenting synopsis’s here (is that the right word? plural of synopsis?), but last night I smoked my last Todos Las Dias from Dunbarton Tobacco and Trust, and felt the need to mention it. Of all the cigars Steve Saka has brought to market, this one is one that it took me the longest to “get”. I suppose the first few I had didn’t seem to draw as well as I’d like, or, more accurately, burned on the wet side, as in over-humidified. This was ironic since Steve was hand picking his IPCPR samples for the exact reason that the samples were still on the wet side from the factory, but the ones I had were in my humidor for some time, so I can only guess that it was my fault, and maybe this liga just needed to be kept as a lower RH. There was an earthy, mushroomy flavor I didn’t care for, and it’s a flavor I typically don’t like in cigars, I think it goes back to a bad mushroom experience I had in the ’80s, but that’s another story. I bought some of the Double Wide Belicosos and put them down for a while in a lower RH humidor. I love the size, Joya de Nicaragua uses the same molds for a couple other cigars in their portfolio and I really dig it. It’s 4¾” x 60 with a blunt, tapered head. With a dryer, open draw, I finally “get” this cigar, and, like the other cigars in the DTT portfolio, I can finally say that there isn’t a cigar in the lineup that I don’t like. It may not be my favorite in the bunch, but it’s certainly one I’d choose over many, many other cigars on the market. It’s still earthy, but it didn’t have that off-putting (to me), mushroomyness, but more of a hearty Nicaraguan peppery flavor. I still need to try the Thick Lonsdale “Mas Fuerte” (Steve’s alleged mistake), and need to put some more Double Wide Belicosos in the humidor. Perhaps tomorrow night’s smoke will be a pre-release Sin Compromiso…or a Nacatamale, or something of that ilk. Or maybe not.

Thursday I posted a video review of the Herics Cigar Measuring Tape. Please let me know if that’s a format you’d like to see more of, or if a little of me on video is enough! If there’s positive feedback, I might do more, if nobody cares, I might do more, if there vehement opposition, I’ll scrap the idea! and, as I alluded to in the last post, I’ll have another contest in the coming weeks which will include one of the tapes along with some other goodies. Speaking of contests, I have to announce the winner of the E.P. Carrillo Prize Package! I added a few cigars to the package, including an Encore Majestic, which was CA’s No. 1 Cigar of the year. These cigars are out of my humidor, it’s completely legal for me to give cigars to my friends! (that should hold off the black helicopters!). So there’s the EPC Hat, the pair of tumblers and steel whisky cubes, lighter and cutter, the CigarProp Lighter Bleed Tool (Thanks Kevin!) and now a five pack of cigars (the La Gloria Cubana isn’t technically an EPC cigar, but it’s made at his factory and was blended with his help, along with Yuri Guillen of General Cigar Co. I’m counting it, it’s my contest. I don’t think the winner is going to complain, it’s a fantastic cigar! So, as per normal, I consulted the random number generator, and Andy Klueber‘s number finally came up. Andy has been lamenting the fact that he never wins for as long as I can remember, so now he can give it a rest! Please send your address so I can send this out to you! Thanks to E.P. Carrillo and Cigar Prop for the goodies, and than you all for your support and participation over the years!

Happy New Year! Until the next time,

CigarCraig

10 Comments

Filed under Contest, Review

Tagged as CigarProp, cigars, Contest, Dunbarton, E.P. Carrillo, La Gloria Cubana, Todos Las Dias

by CigarCraig | December 23, 2018 · 10:31 am

Contest: CigarCraig’s Holiday Giveaways No.2!

It’s the Sunday before Christmas, and time to announce the winner of the Ventura Cigars travel humidor and assorted goodies. I scrounged through the humidors and found some cigars to include too! I let the folks at Kretek International know what I was up to and they were thrilled that I was doing it! The comment selected at random belonged to Victor Miller! Please send me your address so I can ship you your goodies! Thanks again to Ventura, and to everyone who entered!

Our second giveaway of the season really couldn’t have worked out better! On Thursday of this week, Cigar Aficionado announced that the E.P. Carrillo Encore Majestic was their number one cigar of the year! People have mixed feelings on this list, and I really don’t understand why people get so worked up over it. Like any top whatever list, from any media outlet, be it print based, or online, it’s based on individual opinions, it has to be, as cigars ( and spirits, and food) are a subjective, non-quantifiable commodity. Find someone who’s tastes line up with yours and follow their suggestions and don’t crap on other people’s tastes. Whoa, I kinda went on a rant there…people take things too seriously! Live and let live! Lets get back to giving stuff away! This is another un-authorized contest, my friends at EPC don’t know I’m doing this, but I have been a fan of Ernesto’s work for a very long time. The first time I met him at an IPCPR just three years ago was about the first time I’ve been really star-struck meeting someone. I’ve had the chance to hang out with him since and he’s a super cool guy, and I consider his VP one of my better friends in the cigar biz. I think the CA’s choosing Encore for their cigar of the year was spot on not only because it’s a great cigar, but because Ernesto and his company is deserving of the recognition and it’s a cigar that should be reasonably available (at least until last Thursday!). Anyway, I have some EPC goodies including a cool hat, a pair of rocks glasses and some steel ice cubes (I guess, I’m not a drinker, I have to assume that’s what they are, since they came with the glasses. It would be the hardest dice game ever!). There’s an EPC cutter and lighter too, and I’ve selected some cigars from my humidor, and some more might fall in the box when I pack it up! Let’s not forget a handy Lighter Bleed Tool from CigarProp.com to keep that lighter working right for years to come!

Leave a comment (one comment please!) to enter. I think it’s fair to disqualify our previous winner, but everyone else is eligible to win. Must be of legal age in your jurisdiction as usual. I’ll select a winner sometime after Christmas, I have a funky schedule this week (again) so I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance, but maybe I’ll leave it open all week and announce a winner next Sunday to give everyone a chance to enter.

To everyone who celebrates, a Merry Christmas to all! Until the next time,

CigarCraig