Royal Jamaica No. 1 Tubo

Royal Jamaica No. 1 Tubo


This last weekend some buddies and I retreated to a secluded cabin near Enid Oklahoma for some much needed R&R...Scott's grilling, Craig's fine beer, and great cigars made a great trip even better. We had a light rain shower or two, no wind, and clean, cool April evenings. I also got a chance to try out two new things, both gifts from coworkers...my new Mexican pancho and a Royal Jamaica cigar that a coworker brought back for me from one of his Caribbean adventures...

(Yes, I know that the pancho is cooler than Hell but please stay focused on the cigar...)

Gift cigars are always a treat for me to smoke, especially ones I've never had before. They're like test driving a new motorcycle...I never know what to expect but the air is charged with possibilities...

The cigar came in an attractive yellow tube and was double labeled (always a sign of class!). The wrapper was flawless and light, a Connecticut broadleaf I think. No veins were visible and it had a medium strength aroma. I had been aging it for six months or so in my humidor and it was in great condition. It took the flame from my trusty Blazer lighter and we were off!



The stogie had a perfect burn and was a very enjoyable hour. The flavor remained consistent throughout-mostly a mild nutty "creamy" flavor-never offensive. The smoke was thick and seemed to hang in the air, attracting several favorable comments from my amigos who were smoking different sticks.

Overall, the stogie was a solid stick, especially for those who like milder, smooth smokes...and those who appreciate the nice packaging and presentation.

Thanks Chief!

Gran Habano - 3 Siglos

February 28, 2008 -- I choose to celebrate my brother's birthday by grabbing dinner in an Italian restaurant and cigar bar. After polishing off a little chicken with toasted cheese ravioli at the Cigar Box, I settle into a Maker's Mark manhattan and a Gran Habano 3 Siglos. It was part of a 20-pack sampler of Gran Habanos and it has turned out to be my favorite - as excellent a blend as the blonde 5-pack was bad. But that's another review.

Anyway, at $2 a stick, I'm ready for anything. I am very pleasantly surprised. As I sit and puff away, Kellie makes fun of me and we enjoy the lounge singer attacking Journey songs with a vengeance. 3 Siglos translates as "three centuries". Hard to imagine that three centuries ago, no one could have dreamed of the huge glass buildings a couple blocks away - the angular glass-walled Kansas City Star presses, the bowl-shaped glass Sprint Center, the ovalishly cylindrical glass H&R Block building. Or the strip club next door.

The ratings played out like so:

• Appearance - 5 \ Medium width and length at 5X50 robusto. Attractive white & gold double label.
  
• Burn - 7 \ Perfect halfway through but did become somewhat uneven over time.
• Draw - 8 \ Effortless.
• Plummage - 7 \ Solid plummage.
• Flavor - 10 \ Suprisingly flavorful with a notable spice.
• Overall - 9 \ Very likable and an excellent value.

Arturos Fuente Gran Reserva

So I'm not into name brands for hardly anything. Ask anybody who knows me... A brand has to earn my respect -- consistently -- for me to pay more money for it than something else similar at a better price. I do not swoon over brand names.

So when I picked up this Arturo Fuente, I did so because of its impressive size. I just wanted to know what it would be like. Figured it would be good to mix things up some random winter day with a good novelty smoke.

I didn't get around to unpacking this Big Bertha of cigars until a couple of months after its purchase at the Outlaw Cigar store. On the cold evening of February 15th, I found myself at a place as worthy of eyebrow raising as my Fuente boomstick. Kell and I were kicking it at the Kickstand, a local dive we enjoy that manages to cross a biker bar with your uncle's 1970s basement. (If your uncle was a swingin' redneck or buff, that is.)

It's like an old college dive bar, but for mostly blue collar folks. Various union stickers plaster the cramped bathroom's walls. Booths are the size of a spacious phone booth. Christmas and Halloween lights are draped across a ceiling married to brick walls and dark wood paneling. As I order a whisky and a rum-drink, somebody tells me I look like Perseus from Clash of the Titans. And although I thank him for the compliment, the way he's laughing his head off, I get the feeling he didn't really mean it that way. Another fella and his wife come over to me to pay tribute to my stogie and my smokin' hot girlfriend. It's a quick opportunity to feel like you're in a rural American bar while still being in the middle of a metropolis, and I like to drop in once in awhile.

After an hour of half-hearted inattentive sound checks, the middle-aged band explodes into bluesy hard rock renditions of classics. "Travelin' Band" starts it out and flows into songs with refrains such as "That's a cold shock, baby" and "Give me a beat, boy, and Free my soul"...

As for my cigar's ratings, here you go:

• Appearance - 6.5 \ Long to the point of ludicrous. Classy label and sod-hued wrapper.
• Draw - 9 \ Surprisingly decent draw. Firm but fluid.
• Burn - 8 \ OK, especially considering the length. Impressive and even burn for so long a stick.
• Plummage - 7.5 \ Smoke smelled good and put off good amounts.
• Flavor - 5 \ Extremely tasty to start but a little bitter at the end.
• Overall - 7 \ Better than expected and a fun change of pace.

Now since I paid $7-12 retail for this giant, I'm not singing its praises to the mountaintops. But when you've got a cigar you enjoy far more than you expected, you're sharing an adult beverage with your sweetheart, and you start to find yourself jamming out to live covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival, life's looking pretty good.

Camacho 1962 Perfecto

Camacho 1962 Perfecto





First let me set the scene...it's Sunday afternoon and it's the first warm day in a long, long time. I'm setting on my patio as my two littler kids are playing on the driveway. Michelle is putting a new car seat in my new Honda and I'm enjoying some scotch and some much needed rest. Wind is light and the warm sun on my neck is feeling oh so nice.

I really like these little guys...it's the fourth I've had and they run around$2. The double-band is attractive and the shape is really cool...short, stubby, and tapered at both ends...and then given a little "schmushing" (box press). They feel really good in the mouth, smoke well, smell good, and provide about 30 minutes of good times. Tough to beat that.

I found the flavors to be nutty, with a little pepper. I could have sworn I tasted a bit of Cameroon but nothing I've read indicates that it has any. It seemed on many puff to have a "higher" taste than many of the earthy Hondurans that I've been enjoying.




Here's my short fatty after I smoked it a bit. I had to do one touch-up on this dude...after that, it burned like a champ (unlike other Camachos I've had, which can be really good but are often inconsistant).




Here's a guest star of the blog...who came by to show me a leaf. What a sweetie!




Here's the final bit of my smoke with a focus on the ash. Very nice medium flavor, medium strength.

Construction: 9 (very solid-only one correction. Oily and buttery appearance. Short fat and flat...this dude was really great).
Flavor: 8 (A little pepper, a little butter, some leather and some nut. Very pleasant).
Value: 7 (though it only cost $2, it is a pretty small smoke. I'd like to get these for a dollar).
Plumage: 8 (plenty of smoke and it smelled good too. Peppery and a little sweet).
Special: 8 The form factor was great. I noticed some small gold and copper flecks on it when I held it in the sunlight-probably tiny pieces of the band. Kinda cool, though).

Total: 8.116 This is a really good cigar. I suggest you try it if you can get one for around $2 (not hard online).

La Cabana Corojo

Well, it was Sunday night after 7 days of working straight (plus a training gig and a website project) and the last thing you'd think I'd have wanted to do was go out. But as I rolled home from work around 9 last night, I decided to reconnoiter at O'Dowd's on the Plaza. It had been awhile since I'd seen Eddie Delahunt play, and so I decided it was a good chance to get a smoke and a few Boddington's in before the weekend was through.

I brought a gift stogie that my baby had picked up for me from a cigar shop in Omaha. The store is La Cabana, and the cigar is a house brand bearing its name. I have two more I'm looking forward to as well - a maduro and an habano.

The singlemost peculiar thing about this cigar was that it had been rolled into a tapered wrapper nipple at the end. Although I admit to being a little thrown off by this, I was also intrigued. Even more so by the fact that when you cut it off, it's as if it was never there. Why was it there, I have to ask myself. Is someone screwing with me on this? Was it ever there? But yes, it was, and I have proof!

So, to business. Here were my scores:

• Appearance - 5 \ I just found the look impressive overall. I liked the medium brown wrapper, the respectable size and the plain label with a distinctive font, considering it was a house brand. Still, I have to admit that the nipple freaked me out a little, even as it piqued my curiosity.
  
• Draw - 4 \ For the first half, it was a little tighter draw than I prefer, but doable.
  
• Burn - 8 \ Terrific. Never fought it once on the evenness of the burn.
• Plummage - 6 \ Until perhaps the last third, the smoke this baby produced was average. It increased towards the end - but smelled very good throughout.
  
• Flavor - 8 \ For some reason, I was never able to nail down a useful adjective for the flavor or the smell. I just liked it generally. And both the flavor and the aroma got better that last 20 minutes.
  
• Overall - 7 \ This was a worthy smoke, and a pleasant discovery. I'll have to stop by this shop in Omaha sometime.

In other news, Eddie Delahunt and his Mexican bodhran player Gabriel kept things flowing with lots of great stuff I hadn't heard before. They even had a pipist named Rashid who sat in for a song and added a cool "medievalish" feel to things. And towards the end of the evening, Eddie gave an awesome and soulful rendition of "The House of the Rising Sun"... Quite powerful, and a great way to finish my weekend with Kellie.

Cheers!

El Rico Habana

I bought several of these cigars after reading that the maker was the same guy who makes La Gloria Cubana...and I've had several good La Glorias...figured that the El Rico might be a good'un. Plus my brother's name is Eric and I call him "Rico" so, in Ryan T. Reid's mind, buying a five pack or two of these made perfect sense.

Ryan T. Reid's mind can sometimes go horribly, horribly, southwest of Reality.

This dude had a red and gold band, looked rather unremarkable, and smelled...undistinguished. I believe it was a robusto size...probably 5" long and 50 on the ring gauge. The wrapper had some bumps and veins and wasn't shiney or interesting in any way. After I lit it up with my trusty yellow Blazer PB-209, I got a few puffs...and realized that I was probably not in for a treat.

The thing had been resting for almost a year in my humidor. It tasted of plain (but strong) tobacco, with a metallic edge. No pepper, no chocolate, no tea or coffee...just a taste that was nasty enough to be nasty but not nasty enough to be fun (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

The smoke was...okay. The construction was...adequate. The appearance was okay. But the cigar just didn't taste good. I did get a nice nicotine buzz out of it.

Maybe the fact that I'd just realized that I was going to get hosed on my income taxes this year soured the stogie...but the Pacifica beer I drank and a fine stogie should have been able to compensate for a little turbulence in the great skyways of my mental health.

Yeah, I think I can safely say: don't buy this cigar. If I gift you one...don't take it! Or at least trade it to someone who doesn't read Puros on the Low Low.


Construction (x2): 7 It held together. Needed a few touch-ups but nothing serious.
Flavor: 2 (It just didn't taste good. Period.)
Value: 2 (I wouldn't buy another for a quarter)
Plumage: 5 (smoke was present but not "big" and didn't smell good.
Special: 5 (It was noteworthy in that it seemed to have a lot of nicotine in it!)

Total: 4.67

I have learned from this just because a cigar is named after one of my friends or loved ones, it could still suck. I guess I'll hold off on pulling the trigger on the El Scotto and Vegas Cutcliffe boxes that I had marked down to buy!

Gurkha "Nepalese Warrior"

I decided to brave the "wind advisory" in effect for today (40 mph gusts in KC equals a temperate breeze in Dodge City) and enjoy the unseasonably warm temperature of 61 degrees. However, my ignition tool is less than adequate on a still day let alone a very windy one. Combine that with some questionable construction and the total score for this admirable smoke suffered more than perhaps it should. We'll see. My wife gave me 20 of these delightful stogies and I'm looking forward to refining my opinion after really getting to know it.

The Nepalese Warrior is the same cigar as the Class Regent with the exception of the dark brown Cameroon wrapper.

Construction: 4?
W.T.F? This shipment of cigars suffered some slight damage in the factory perhaps. I gently pulled two more out of their wrappers and found flaws in all of them; though most are very small. The wrappers all feel a little dry and brittle. A few more weeks in the humidor might ease that a bit but I don't know. In any case, taking the guillotine to the end of it make a horrid crunching sound and caused more flaking and peeling than I think is normal. As it burned, the much vaunted Cameroon wrapper gradually peeled off and blew away. Still, I managed to smoke it down to the nub; that is, it held together well enough for me to smoke it. Others in the shipment might be better.

Appearance: 8
I love Gurkha's labels. I particularly like the Legend Aniversario and the Royal Brigade colors but this one is nice as well. While brittle (see above) the wrapper is lovely to look at and I like box-pressed cigars. Still, they feel a little....delicate in the hand and they're not very big. Not that I'm preoccupied with size mind you.

Burn: 7?
The wind was kicking my arse on this one. I never did get it evenly lit (crappy butane torch) so it didn't burn evenly. My guess is that it would normally burn easy and even under anything less than hurricane force winds. I never had to re-light it.

Flavor: 9
Here is where this baby shines. I like medium-bodied consistent smokes and this one fits the bill without par. Slightly sweet with a very nice leathery smell throughout. Earthy and super smooth all the way. There was only a dash of pepper toward the end.

Unlit Smell: 8
I love smelling cigars. In fact, I think I like smelling them unlit more than I like smoking them. However, man can endure only so much foreplay; it's going to get smoked sooner or later. The smell brings more of that leathery goodness. A fine sniffer despite not being a powerhouse smoke which typically smell better but don't suit my palate.

Value: 10
On the small size, it only took me about an hour to finish. For me that's not a detractor. My patience level with cigars is about 60 minutes anyway. I got 20 for $30 plus shipping. Perfect.

Plumage 8?
Hard to say when I was smoking in a tornado. It put out a fair amount of smoke under the circumstances. Another smoke will tell me more.

Special: 8
It's a Gurkha, yo. Some some respect.

Total Score: 8