Happy New Year and welcome to the 12th year of CigarCraig.com. Hopefully everything keeps going on the same as it has been for the past 11! I hope everyone had safe and healthy celebrations on New Years Eve, I fell asleep on the couch after smoking a really good cigar. I dug to the bottom of one of the rarely ventured into humidors and found a Havana Romeo y Julieta Tubed Churchill that has been there for well over a decade that was simply sublime. I figured with everything happening in the world it was as good a time as any to smoke this cigar. It was floral and woody (cedar sleeve in the tube, ya know), burned perfectly and was absolutely wonderful. I find that I’m more often than not disappointed by Havanas lately, but this older cigar was exceptional. I have a few very old Havanas in the humidor yet, I hope they provide a similar experience.
For my first cigar of the new year I selected a Liga Privada Serie Unico Year of the Rat. This is a Corona Gorda, 5 1/2 x 46, with a Broadleaf wrapper, Brazilian binder and Nicaraguan and Honduran fillers. One may think that this cigar is in the same family as the Dirty Rat and Ratzilla, but those two have the Stalk Cut Habano wrapper and this has a blend closer to the No.9. It’s a really good, bold cigar, lots of dark espresso flavor and very meaty. I would love to have tried the original 2016 version that was made for the lounge at the Florida Panther’s Sunrise Center Arena, but I never made it to a game, and I don’t know if they ever managed to sell any there anyway! I’m sure they are pretty much the same as they were then. I had one of these art the TPE show and it was quite good too. A nice way to start the year. I could do without the foil wrap, only because it’s a pain to remove, but it looks spiffy.
Yesterday I stopped into Top Shelf Cigars in Skippack, PA for a visit with Jim Cronin, the owner. This shop, in a kitschy little village with crafty shops and restaurants, has been there for 18 years, and has a very nice classic selection of cigars. I say classic, in that there is not a lot of boutique selections, in a location like this, I imagine that recognizable brands sell better than more cigar geek type of stuff. I still was able to find some cigars I hadn’t smoked yet (although nothing on my top ten list), the Miami Cigar & Co. Don Lino Africa, which I smoked in the Duma Robusto size. This is a new version of this cigar, if you looked way back at one of my very early blog posts, you’d find that I bought a five pack of Africas at Holts, but those are long gone. These are now made by AJ Fernandez, with a Habana 2000 wrapper, Cameroon binder and Dominican and Nicaraguan fillers. The old version was far more “Cameroony” than the new, although there is still a hint of the Cameroon sweetness from the binder. It was a good performing cigar with a nice flavor. I enjoyed the Robust and brought home a toro to try another time.
Since the topic of La Aurora’s distribution with Miami Cigar and Company (who owns the Don Lino Africa brand) came up, and whether Miami Cigar Co. was going to continue to distribute La Aurora after letting their sales staff go recently, I figured I’d smoke the new La Aurora 107 Nicaragua. I thought I’d read that La Aurora was sticking with Miami Cigar, but there seems to some confusion in the market about that. Without a sales force, does either brand really have that much of a market presence to keep up? Has 2020 given companies the notion that Zoom meetings can replace face to face interaction, both in the way of sales calls and in store events? It’ll be interesting to see, and I feel really bad for all the great sales reps who find themselves out of work. Anyway, I had picked up a couple of the La Aurora 107 Nicaraguas in the Gran Toro, 6” x 58 size. This is a Nicaraguan puro. I probably should have gotten a smaller size, because this one took half the cigar to really get going. The first half of the cigar was mild to the point of almost being without flavor. When it finally got there, it was very tasty, nice, earthy flavors, although not awfully distinctive or overly interesting. I’ll try a few more in different sizes, but this might fall into the 50% or so of La Aurora cigars that I don’t really like.
Well, that’s all for today. There is one more thing. I tried to do a Reader’s Poll, which I need to either find a better way, or abandon completely. The winner, by the way, was the Southern Draw Rose of Sharon. It was unanimous, as there was only one response. Considering it’s a delicious cigar, definitely in my top five Connecticut cigars, I’ll let it stand. With that, until the next time,
CigarCraig
