Navy No. 1056 | CigarCraig's Blog

This is the second and final installment in my series of posts recapping my experiences smoking the Dunbarton Tobacco and Trust Stillwell Star cigars that I purchased at the launch event in South Carolina a week and a half ago. I went into this exercise with an open mind, but with very little experience with pipe tobacco. I’ve smoked a pipe in a the past, but I always found that there was too much work involved and I didn’t get enough satisfaction from it commensurate with the effort involved, the preparation, the cleaning, the general fiddling around involved in smoking the pipe. I’m much happier to just light a cigar and put it down when I’m done and be finished with it. I find that far more relaxing. Of course, that’s just me, there seem to be dozens of people who enjoy smoking a pipe. I even saw Saka smoking a pipe at the event, first time in the twenty-some odd years I’ve known him that I’ve witnessed that. Anyway, Monday I smoked the Bayou No. 32, which I was quite looking forward to. This cigar, like all of them, has the Ecuador Habano Oscuro wrapper and San Andrés cultivo tonto binder with Nicaraguan fillers. It also has a blend of Bright, Red Virginia and St. James Parish Perique pipe tobaccos. This was another one that struck me as more cigar than pipe, which I suppose is the point. This one started out with some pepper spice, a more unique pepper than one usually finds in a cigar. As the cigar progressed, the spice became a little mouth coating, perhaps cloying is a word one might use. It was interesting, a different texture than normal in a cigar. I’ve smoked cigars with Perique in the blend before, but none have been this unique. This was an interesting smoke.

Finally, there’s the Navy No. 1056. This one has Red and Golden Virginias, “Naval Rations,” Orientals and Latakia pipe tobaccos blended with dark air-cured black cigar leaves in the filler. As with the other three, I polled others on the room note, and on all but the first one I got “cigar”. I suppose it would be different if people were familiar with pipe aromas, sadly we are not. This was another good tasting cigar. It had a smokey sweetness, throughout, very interesting. It was medium bodied, like the other three, and very smooth. All four samples burned perfectly, which was interesting, I wasn’t sure how the different tobaccos were going to burn, but I suppose Steve wasn’t going to put something out that isn’t going to work right. I found smoking these four cigars to be an interesting exercise, however, these aren’t going to be regular rotation cigars for me, I doubt I’ll even go back to them to be honest. As good as they are, they didn’t excite me as much as the other cigars in the Dunbarton portfolio. I’m glad I smoked them, but I’m happier with a Mi Querida, Sin Compromiso or Sobremesa any day of the week. Of course, that’s just me, your mileage may vary.