Vitola: Robusto- 5” x 50 ring gauge
- Price $11
- Samples provided by ATL Cigar Company
Background
Flying in the face of FDA regulations and in defiance of the increasingly splintered social fabric of our country, the ATL Cigar Company started up in 2020 with the high ideal of working to connect people…specifically the people in Atlanta, where the 3 founders of the company met 15 years before at a hot dog stand that became “a street bar for wanderers, a corner church without a pulpit.” Owning that stand became a basis for starting conversations, those conversations made connections, and those connections led to friendships…and when friendships came into being among people from different backgrounds, it could lead to healing “wounded places and wounded people.”
One of their first releases was Libertad (Spanish for “liberty” or “freedom”), developed in partnership with Aganorsa Leaf, and featuring all Nicaraguan tobacco. It celebrates “the Cuban-seed leaf and production process Eduardo Fernandez began curating in the Jalapa Valley more than twenty years ago” and includes a Corojo wrapper leaf. They make it in either Robusto or Toro sizes and it comes boxes of 20 cigars.
ATL Cigar Company reached out to me a couple months back to ask if I would like to review their latest cigar, Magic. I said “Absolutely!” and they were kind enough to send samples of not just that one, but a couple of their other blends. This is the third time I’ve smoked this blend for this review.
Prelight
As with many brands on the market these days and especially with newer brands, ATL Cigar Company has a common main band with a “color coding” system to distinguish between blends. The design in nice, but I’m going to just mention that the naming of the company is potentially problematic right from the outset. My “home shop” is just two hours north of Atlanta and their first reaction to the company was “Those cigars are just for Atlanta.” While there are 125+ cigar shops in Atlanta, the company will need more than those to be onboard if they want to grow…and putting a city name (besides “Miami” or “Tampa” or “Esteli” or “Havana”) in your company name is at least a speed bump if not a road block. At any rate, the banding design does look nice and I like it in the red used for Libertad.
The wrapper leaf was a medium brown with a little dusky red mixed in. It had a decent amount of oiliness under my fingertips and was finished with a tight little pigtail on the cap. It had an aroma of wood and hay mostly. The cigar had a closed foot so there wasn’t much more aroma there.
After clipping, the prelight draw was excellent and featured flavors of hay, buttered popcorn, and a slight syrupy sweetness.
Flavor
I fired up the ATL Libertad and got spicy cedar at the outset, followed on by earth and grassy notes, then some citrus sweetness and red pepper. The retrohale was seriously peppery, with a red pepper/wasabi searing my sinuses for a few seconds each time I blew the smoke out through my nose. As I continued through the first third, I got more woody and sweet notes mixed, along with plenty of pepper in a nice medium-bodied smoke.
As I got into the second third, I got more cedar while the sweetness tailed off a bit, allowing the earthy flavors to come through stronger. Pepper spice was still an ever-present part of the flavor profile.
Toward the end of the second third and beginning of the final one, sweetness came back in the form of sweet grassiness, while the cedar and pepper spice continued on as before.
Construction
I had a solid ash the whole time, excellent draw, and even burn line.
Value
This stick sits right at the “average” price for a premium cigar and delivers a great experience, so well worth the money.
Conclusions
The ATL Libertad is a very fine blend, which one comes to expect with cigars coming out of the Aganorsa Leaf factory. It was a nicely complex medium-bodied blend with enough change to keep me interested and a steadily excellent flavor. Great debut (or early blend from this new company and it gives one high hopes for what they may come up with in the future.
By-The-Numbers
Prelight: 2/2
Construction: 2/2
Flavor: 4.5/5
Value: 1/1
Total: 9.5/10
