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Mahogany, Diesel and the Weekend – March 7, 2010

Friday evening I had the opportunity to visit Mahogany on Walnut in Philadelphia. I had dropped my wife off at the Franklin Institute to see Philadelphia TV news legend Larry Kane give the first of a series of presentations on his time spent with the Beatles.  She said after that the lecture was outstanding.

Mahogany is a cigar bar conveniently located over top of Holt’s flagship store.  I arrived and found a seat at the corner of the bar with a view of the Flyers /Sabres game on the television.  I chose a Don Lino Africa Kifaro, which smoked very nicely.  Soon I was joined by my old friend Doc, who I haven’t seen in several years.  Doc and I have logged hundreds of herf-miles….we’ve been many places between the Jersey Shore and Las Vegas, from Buffalo to North Carolina,  it borders on the insane.  I think Doc and I “met” on a cigar IRC chat back in 1996.  It was great to get together with him again and share some cigars.  Doc had some very well aged goodies with him, one of which was a delicious un-banded petite corona which he didn’t know what exactly it was, and the other he shared with me was a Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure no.2.  Both cigars were at least 10 years old and both were outstanding examples of great cigars that you just can’t get around here.  Since Doc hasn’t been keeping up with all of the great cigars that have come on the market in the last several years, I gave him a Liga Privada T52, which he enjoyed.  I had selected this particular cigar because we are both acquainted with the blender of this line.  All in all a great evening except for losing my wife in the Franklin Institute, which worked out for her because she got to talk to Larry Kane one on one in the parking garage.

Last night, after a beautiful day here that made me get the bike out of the shed and take it out for a spin, I smoked a Diesel Unholy Cocktail on my evening walk.  This is a 5″ x 56 torpedo dressed in a dark, Pennsylvania broadleaf wrapper, made by A.J. Fernandez in Nicaragua.  This cigar started out quite spicy, and had an even burn and held the ash for almost half the length of the cigar.  The spiceyness eased up and delivered very dense mouthfuls of flavorful smoke.  If I had to rate this by my friend Doc’s scale, it gets a “I would smoke this again”, and I will since I have another in the humidor.  These are very reasonably priced at $4 for a single and around $100 for a box of 30. A very nice cigar and and proof that great cigars are being produced at a good price,although I think the name is kind of dumb.

Don’t forget to enter our contest by leaving your guess in the comments of my last post! There’s a whole week to go and there are some pretty good guesses.

Until the next cigar,

CigarCraig

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A New Look and a New Home for the CigarCraig.com Blog!

As you may have noticed, I’ve made some changes to the CigarCraig.com blog.  I’m still using the WordPress platform, but instead of using the free WordPress.com blog, I’m running the WordPress software on the CigarCraig.com servers.  This gives me some more flexibility regarding embedding videos, as I did on my last post (starring our cat Max making the contest winner selection), as well as embedding some widget based content in the right column.  Just like any website, this one is a work in progress.  I’m toying with the idea of making this blog the front page of the site and building the additional pages around it.  I’m on the fence as to whether to use the Worpress templates to maintain a consistent theme, or to continue writing my own HTML for the additional pages.  I’ve already put up  “about” and  “links” pages to see hoe it looks, please let me know what you think.  The lazy bastard in me leans toward using the template,  but I kind of like the format of the main site.  I will have to have a cigar and ponder all the ramifications of these decisions.  The old blog, cigarcraig.wordpress.com,  will remain in place for posterity (there is a widget that links to the content housed there).

Something I recently found out about the cigarcraig.wordpress.com blog is that, by default, WordPress has a “feature” called mShots, which pops up a screenshot of any links in your blog.  This can be turned off in the appearance section of the WordPress dashboard under Extras. I never even noticed this until it was pointed out to me by a reader who said it disuaded him from reading my posts.  I wanted to mention this to others using WordPress.com so they know that this is occurring, it came as a surprise to me!  The wordpress.org software doesn’t appear to have this “feature”. Many thanks to Ted for pointing this out to me.

To keep this on topic, I enjoyed a Romeo y Julieta Habana Reserve Toro last night.  It was smooth and creamy and burned perfectly. Altadis’ website categorizes it as “a medium to full body smoke”, but I find these on the mild side.  Maybe I’m just a little jaded.  I would recommend these to someone who likes milder cigars as a step up, but, to me at least, these are medium at best.  Not that this is a bad thing, I would hate for someone to avoid these based on the manufacturers characterization of these as a medium to full body smoke.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter (@cigarcraig) if you’re so inclined, and keep an eye out in the next few weeks for the March contest.  I’ve received some amazing stuff to give away!  You don’t want to miss out on the chance to win.

Until the next cigar,

CigarCraig


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