Cigars Compared

This cigar mysteriously ended up in my little humidor after having some friends over for a backyard cigar, brews and grill night so I had to research it a little to learn about it. The band indicates it is from Guillermo Rico, who, it appears, works with George Rico. The black label is rated as a mild, despite its dark wrapper, from Honduras. I find it in bundles of 20 at prices ranging from $2.12-$2.25. The filler is Nicaraguan and Mexican with a Honduran binder and a Nicaraguan corojo wrapper.It is sold a 6 by 54 and called a gran robusto but a toro in my book.

The cap is a bit stemmy and nicely built up. The wrapper is smooth and I seem to be getting the tobacco spice taste from the filler, but it may be fooling me and actually live on the wrapper. There are medium and dark brown colors in the filler, and in the lens is the clearest picture I’ve seen where the binder can be seen behind the filler at the foot. The cap, when chewed, is of unremarkable taste, and makes lots of spit just fine. The stick doesn’t seem to want to take up spit at first.

The stick has a little give, or pillowy feel to it when rolled in my fingers. The taste seems fairly full at first light. It has a nice high thing in the nose too, right at the start. nice even burn from an unattentive lighting. The taste calms down soon.At 1/2 inch – again I choose the word unremarkable, but also without any big flaws. The only thing jumping out is the nice nose.

The ash seems firm enough, very light grey outer from the wrapper of this mystery acquisition, with some odd streaks of darker grey showing as lines in the ash. The wrapper is dark, but not maduro dark. I flick it at an inch to see the inside ash. It has a typical darker binder ring ash separating the light grey wrapper ash from the slightly darker filler ash. I notice what appear to be gaps in the filler ash, which might explain the give when rolled and the tendency to heat up.

I try to putz around the yard while trying to get a sense of the cigar. I recall the ring was tight on the stick but went easily over my ring finger knuckle. Is it really a 54? In my mind before researching it I put it at 52. It begins to give a pleasant after taste. The smoke, while becoming fuller, still shows nothing remarkable, and no flaws – well it does want to burn a little hot. Woody I might call the aftertaste. Two inches, burn still even.

I flick it again and notice the filler ash is much darker now, and I smell a tarry smell briefly. Taste gets darker and a little tarry, too. The burn starts favoring one side and it heats up, the smoke is more voluminous.

Over the next inch the burn canoes and then fixes itself in the subsequent half inch – and the taste mildens back out. Definitely feeling some nic with 2 inches left. At the mouth end, it softens but doesn’t fall apart or break up like a short filler cigar sometimes does, the taste continues to darken.

Inch and a half left and it ashes up much in the taste with typical ashy sweets. Very conventional, medium to mild cigar, and bonus of a fat toro. Filler ash much, much darker at the end. Final aftertaste ash and tar.

Pictures coming soon.

Big Round of Toros and Robustos
Some of these will be new to contests and I will mix flight samplers with some others. I know it will include as a benchmark the El Rey del Mundo special from J&R – a very nice $2.25 toro. It will also almost certainly include Gurkha Symphony – called a robusto but a true toro. For the Robustos I am going to range wide because I have a fair number in flight samplers. But the benchmark here will be the Nestor Miranda Doppelbock, since I intend to explore anew the very dark ones I may have in sufficient quantity to compare. As a matter of fact I just enjoyed very much a toro from a flight sampler – this one the Oliva G Series Cameroon Toro.

In the meantime, the first two cigars I went with were a robusto and a robusto equivalent. The robusto was the Cuvee 151 of which I still have maybe one more remaining. I really liked it. Worked in the yard, walked around. It was delicious. The other was the J&R Alternative to Montecristo No. 2, which is certainly a part of this round. I say robusto equivalent cause after you bite off the tip, it is a robusto size. It was quite good as well. I may be more of a Robusto lover than I let on.

I had two robustos in short order yesterday, the delicious El Rey del Mundo oscuro robusto (alas perhaps the last one in the box), and then the Trinidad y Cia robusto. The blend in the ERDM and the presentation in its tissue wrapper are admirable. The nose is what you would expect in such a dark wrapper, extremely pleasant when smoking very slowly. The Trinidad, because it doesn’t offer the same nose pleasures – fits in well as a faster smoke (but not much!). The ERDM was so good but was it more than 3 times better? sigh. Now I’m considering today’s selection. I’m drawn again to the JR Alternative to Montecristo No. 2. I look it up in the website and now they do not offer the one from Nicaragua. Now it is from DR. Very interesting twists in our search for the elusive low cost dreamboat cigar. At under $2/stick the JR is compelling.

I’m enjoying this round quite much. I’m very drawn to coronas when I am short on time. The Trinidad is better than acceptable, and the Alvarez Lopez is even better (albeit pricier and as a practical matter, no longer available at JR but still on offier in the discount cigar section at 1st Class Humidors. $1.25/stick at list compared to $1/stick for the Trinidad). Among Robustos, I am loving those dark little guys that I ran in a bonus comparison some time ago – the El Rey Del Mundo Robosto Oscuro, the Gurkha Black Dragon, The Cuveee 151. I’m keeping on with the Thompsons and Flor de Filipinas as well and even some Trinidad robustos – not as good as the little black cigars but way less pricey ($2.50+ vs <$1), and the Nestor Miranda Doppelbock is even a step above the regulars if not quite up to the other little robustos.

And the toros – I’ve been back to the Gurkha Beauty, Symphony Robusto, Micro Bath VH7 Vintage Shaggy, also the VS55 seconds, the remnants of the Dominican sampler and many others. If I have the time the toro is the thing. Then there have been the JR Alternative mentioned above. It just never lets me down.

Today (4/30) I enjoyed a Flor de Filipina Robusto cigar. This was one of the really tight, tasty ones. I’ve commeted before on the igh variability among/between bundle cigars. Why do they make it into the seconds piles? Surely sometimes it is wrapper imperfections, and other times it is the filler and/or the roll. This one must have been on the visual thing I cannot see – side of the equation.

Today – May Day – I revisited the El Rey special. It has got to be the benchmark for the intersection of affordability and high quality. A decent toro at $2.25 – beyond decent. Slim, it does not quite rise to its stated 50 ring size. Ring size is not the end all! it is close enough and keeps you at the margin of 90 points continually. Consistent (far beyond any bundle – including the ones that sometimes jump high on the scale on a one off basis) and always tasty. I like being king of the world!

The range of promotions from the big direct cigar firms may look different but they provide the same range of discounts and by their results show the maximum discounts obtainable – rarely more than 30%ish (off normal price, not list, a useless number).

The best ways I’ve found to maximize my cheapiness are:
For Cigars International
Watch the Daily Joe to get free shipping, then home in on the bargains you have already researched. The bargains themselves only present part of your savings if you don’t get free shipping. You may get your best opportunity on the day when they change the special many times per day – the Joe’s Jambalaya. However, in today’s jambalaya the first offer I see is at more than regular price. =P Still worth watching for once you identify some other targets. My favorites with CI are the CAO Dream Team and the whatever is current Gurkha promo. Their action house, CigarBid offers a better chance to sift and review in advance for something you want – especially if you want a bundle, a box, or more and still get about the same discount. When I win a bid I look for some targets of opportunity (I’m already paying shipping). Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that CI and the auction house are different entities and act accordingly when thinking about what you want to order. Do watch for their big Dutch auction specials

Thompsons
Thompsons cigars has a much more limited free shipping deal but it is there. It is worthwhile watching Thompson for the very cheapest handmade cigars. Their auction promotion makes it economical to get bundles and low end boxes at $10 and under reliably. As with CI, once you are in for shipping, look for targets of opportunity!

to be continued

This is a big, six inch cigar. This is that kind of double ring I just cannot get off whole but it feels in my mouth that it is 55 or bigger and when I see what they make I reckon it must be the 6 by 60 Gordo. It holds my mouth open a little too much. This cigar has fair spice to the wrapper at first taste. Chewing the cap I find it is not bitter like a Connecticut wrapper. A little sweeter. The filler tastes fine with the taste smell you get in your mouth before you light it. The wrapper feels just a tad stiff, nothing a little moistening with my mouth won’t take care of and I enjoyed tasting the progression of flavors from the wrapper as its spicy sweet taste dissipates. Once moistened it smells spicy – tobacco spicy, too.

Early puffing, very cool, I get these fruity flavors in the first puffs – wow – really something, and the dark wrapper is turning up in the nose (as usual). The burn line proceeds slowly across teh cut and slowly down the sides, nice and even. A lot of smoke as you might expect from so large a burning end. Jim did tell me to allow “a couple of hours” to enjoy it. The smoke taste is puffy sort of like he Gurkha Beauty. The ash seems uniformly pale gray. With this size it is even hard to keep my mouth closed to keep in the smoke.

The ash is sturdy, but my curiosity got up when I saw a black spot in the very middle of the ash at the end, so I flicked it early. I find a swirl of black in the grey ash – starting at the middle and in one roll ending on the edge. This gives me something to think about in regards to how cigars are rolled.

It coats my mouth with a sweet (slight tar plus a hint of minty and before it is robusto length I can feel the nicotine. At 3 inches the flavor darkens considerably and it wants to slow down. Hotter, the fruit tastes are all gone, the mint slightly stronger. At finish it is mintier still, but very nice to the end, less than an inch.

It was a gift from Jim Nicholson at Tech Painting – a great residential and commercial painting company – so I don’t know the price but CI leads me to think $6/stick is in the range. 6×60, Nicaraguan made with a double-wrapper combination: Connecticut Broadleaf Maduro outer and a fuller-flavored Brazilian Maduro inner over a filler blend of tobaccos from Nicaragua, Honduras, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.

The Oliva was a very nice cigar but got few notes taken as I was busy. It had a very nice burn, nice flavor, goooood! A cool, slow smoke. I was a bit less superlative at the halfway point. The ash was light for the darker wrapper, a little darker inside with a dark band. I gave it about a 90 with less for value considering the cost. I got it in an on sale Oliva flight sampler from CI at 10 for $29 – it included 2 each of several Oliva offerings. I’ll take more time with the second one for sure.

Sorry – I took off the ring before taking my signature shot. It measured just a teeny tad under 6 inches. Ring just squeezed over my ring finger knuckle, right around 50.

Stogie Reviews has a good review of the Oliva G Cameroon here – you will probably want a more complete picture than I give.

While H Uppmann has given this cigar a different name, it is in fact a toro cigar and quite a fine one it is, too. I got it in a J&R special “choice Dominican assortment” sampler which was offered when I went to check out on another order. The package says it was made at Tabacalera de Garcia and indeed the cigars from this package have had fairly consistent build and flavor. I paid $3.60/stick and it is billed as medium bodied and cool burning with a nutlike flavor. Well I can say it was pretty cool burning and medium bodied.

The package is pretty, it is wrapped in a very thin strip of cedar, bound with a gold ribbonish ring and at the top a second ring holds the cedar, once removed there is another ring on the stick itself. The color is pleasing and the stick seems fatter than the 50 ring size stated, but this turned out to be illusory.

As I hold the H Uppmann Souvenir toro cigar in my mouth and it begins to moisten, there is just the barest hint of the fermenty scent I associate with so many cigars, hardly any scent at all. The wrapper’s taste has a little twinge of – I want to say thyme – but I suspect it is the cedar.As I mentioned, they put a second ring at the top of the cedar strip to hold it in place right over the top of the ring on the cigar itself. I thought it was a 52 but the ring came off fine and is a very tight fit going over my ring finger knuckle, so I say right about 50 as advertised. The cap is built up as I’ve come to expect from the sticks in this Dominican specialty Tabacalera de Garcia sampler. The filler has that orange rind hint I noticed in some of the other sticks, especially the R&J Real. The taste before lighting has nothing that jumps out, just good cigar tobacco flavor.

I give ti 4 or 5 puffs when lighting, a little slim on the puffing, the light takes fine. This stick is a little on the humid end of the scale – this humidor is running at a bit over 75% (which is giving me some problems) but I like the cigars a bit moister, to be honest. The initial taste is quite mild but that is ever the case with a longish stick. The barrel is very firm to the touch and it feels good and firm in my mouth. The nose has some very pleasant things going on. I get a tingle at the middle edge of my tongue and observe the light has progressed perfectly.

The sky has progressed from mild to heavy overcast and I suspect rain will visit soon. I notice my neighbots pinks are beginning to bloom and a wren watches me nervously. I must be where she wants to be. The air temperature is just about as good as can be. I lunched with my friend Chick Grimsley, one of the owners of Fairfax Transfer. Give him a call for Northern Virginia home or office moving. Unfortunately, he could not join me for a dessert cigar.

The ash is as if a picture from a cigar magazine like Aficionado straight out from a very thin burn line and pale grey in color, persistent and strong.

More after the fold.
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Quality: 72

Value: 89

By the book: J&R Cigars, where I purchased a bundle of 20 of these everyday cigars, says this is a 6 1/8 inch by 50 ring size cigar. It has an Ecuadorian medium brown (E) wrapper and is described as having the “genuine black tobacco taste” so I will call this taste black tobacco until disabused.

Like the other cigars I’m sampling, this is one is made in Nicaragua. It is a nice Toro and I like it. The shop bundle is celophane wrapped with a large printed band around the bunch, with each cigar individually wrapped in celophane. The ring is a pretty blue with the image of what I take to be a Spanish lady with a fan, her hair put up but with curls down the back and a flower setting off her hairdo. The Rosa Cuba name is in gold, raised print. Nice touch.

More after the fold.
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And the corona takes the crown!

Let me just come out and say it, the coronas from the western hemisphere beat the robustos from the Phillipines handily for the spring title. From the bottom, the habano wrapper doesn’t add to the Filipino stick inside, the Thompson Explorer suffesrs from the same high variability as the Flor de Filipinas with some sticks being considerably better than others, but the wrapper in the puro gives better nose and smoke in my experience. The Flor was the best single cigar, one time in 3 or 4. There was much less variability in the coronas. The Trinidad I believe is produced at Lew Rothmans’s – now Altadis’ NATSA, They say it uses trimmings from a top brand or brands in mostly long filler. Well worth it especially if you can get a great bargain in the Thompson auction.

As Altadis distributed labels, the Trinidad and the Alvarez Lopez are auction available (when/if) on J&R auctions – but the Trinidad is an ok bargain at full price. As a “value” the Trinidad” is the top choice, on quality only, I like the Alvarez Lopez better. The Connecticut wrapper and the binder/filler inside all seem a bit better – maybe just more to my taste but there it is. Too bad I only got 20 compared to 40 of the Trinidad but it was a better sale price.

It is well worth noting that none of the four are bad cigars and all share some qualities – especially the almost smoked all the way minty-basil-y taste.

Now as I write this I am revisiting the Gurkha Beauty. this one is having no burn issues which has been the only downfall of this enormous stick. When it burns well, it is my favorite of all the sticks I have stowed in my humidors and when it can be had under $3 a stick is in my opinion a great bargain. So much interesting stuff going on in the nose and the steam tastes, all riding over a really solid, tasty base smoke. and pretty.

I also revisited a couple of other favorites – the Gurkha Symphony Robusto, very similar to the Beauty but not quite as fat and the El Rey del Mundo special toro from J&R – which sits very high indeed on my list of favorites. Trying to figure out what my next round should be since my humidor is full, full and I need to smoke down some room before buying any more bundles.

One last thing. I want guest reviewers! Do you have a cigar review in you? Apply at the Join the Club link and let’s start communicating about how to get your guest cigar review into Cigars Compared. I would especially appreciate if others would join me in the next round’s comparison/ongoing review.

The Gurkha Vintage Shaggy Toro cigar is a very tasty and satisfactory smoke. I’m very glad to have picked up 10 – but at the moment I cannot remember whether it was an auction or a sale. Either way I’m sure they came from CI. There, the regular price is $8 / stick. Probably comes in a wonderful box.

I love the copper colored ring. It took a long while to take up spit and let me find the taste of the wrapper. With the temperature warming up I should not have so much trouble keeping my humidors in the right range. A little woodpecker is trying to distract me away from writing my review to my camera, already set up on a tripod with a long lens but I am resisting. The tobacco leaves of the filler have been nicely arranged. They emerge from the wrapper, left short on purpose (shaggy). They are almost perfect and look like the carvings of tobacco leaves in the US and Virginia capitols.

The taste of the wrapper, once it has gotten a little damp from my mouth, is bitter, but the taste is slight compared to some wrappers. It does not have that powdery tacky feel I get with some (mainly Nicaraguan) cigars at this stage. It has a good, strong elephant house scent to the wrapper, once moistened.

I bite off the cigar cap, which is a coherent little folded or twisted bit of wrapper leaf. It comes off easily and I give it a chew. The leaf bitters are, of course, much stronger when chewed, a good spitty tobacco, tasty, staining my spit dark brown.

The filler has a nice taste before lighting – lacks the usual Dominican orange rind touches – a more solid, neutral good-tobacco taste.

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The EP Carrillo New Wave Stella is a corona sized cigar. You can see from the photos it is just a tad over 5 inches and is right on as far as the other coronas I’ve been smoking, go. Events have conspired to prevent me doing the serious review yet, but it is not a competitor – I think I only got 5 in a deal (you should always do that in auctions. When you win something, and you are going to pay, see if something is closing in any second or minute that would be a good add-on, or maybe it has a buy it now price but I like winning a bonus surprise – that is how I got these when I won something else). Normally priced at $90 for 20 I think I got these at $13 for 5. Dominican made, Connecticut wrapper.

This E.P. Carrillo New Wave Stella Connecticut Corona cigar is a cut above the two coronas in the winter-spring round soon coming to a close. I like them both, they both have the minty, basil-y taste when smoked low. This one doesn’t and is really better from start to finished and also priced that way. I give it an 83 on quality, but it comes in lower on value.

I really meant to write the long review last time but my neighbor came over and who wouldn’t rather have a talk with your neighbor, especially if your neighbor doe not mind you are smoking a Carrillo New Wave Stella cigar.