Originally published at Tiki Bar Online
Robusto-ish, 5.5″ x 52 ring gauge / ~$13.95, MSRP
I would like to thank John Brooke over at Drew Estate for providing the samples that I smoked for this review. If I hadn’t gotten those I probably would have missed out on getting to smoke this cigar at this point. Unfortunately by the time you read this it will be very difficult to find this cigar as there aren’t that many boxes in the wild as of yet. Hopefully they will be able to rectify that as time goes on. This cigar is part of the Unico series, which is an offshoot of the Liga Privada line. These cigars come packed in 12 count boxes. They are comprised of Nicaraugan and Honduran fillers, a Brazilian Mata Fina binder and a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper. This review sample was the second one I got to smoke.
The wrapper on this sample was nice golden brown in color. The color was surprisingly even which seems to be rare for CT Broadleaf. The wrapper exhibited a good amount of oils and some tooth to it as well. The pigtail cap on both of my samples were damaged in shipping so you can’t see that is actually like the one on the Dirty Rat. Putting my nose to the wrapper brought about the intense aroma of barnyard and cedar while I got some sweet hay and barnyard from the foot. After clipping it and taking a cold draw on it the only thing I could really taste was a sugary sweetness with a good draw.
I don’t remember this happening on the other sample, but this one took some doing to get lit up. Once I got it lit up I got hit with a blast of intense red pepper like spice on the tongue and the retrohale. After a few puffs I started to get some maple sweetness with leather and grilled meat flavors coming through. As I got towards the end of the first third I started to note some cinnamon flavors as well. The cigar was definitely in the medium-full range to start. The draw was great and like most Liga derivations it produced a large volume of smoke. The burn was slightly off bur nothing that i needed to correct.
Once I moved into the second third I started to get some notes of leather, cola, cedar with some cinnamon on the finish. The spice did tone down a bit but was still very noticeable. I did get some nicotine hit from it as the strength built slightly. The construction continued on causing no problems.
As I moved into the final third the spice really ramped up to a point where it pretty much completely overwhelmed any flavors. I could only get a slight taste of cinnamon occasionally. The burn had evened out by the end and the draw continued to be great.
Overall while I really liked this cigar, I think that it could really benefit from some age. Most of you know that I like a lot of spice in a cigar, but this was just slightly too much. I would like to get a couple and hang on to them and age them and see what happens but we will see. I also think that is probably the strongest Drew Estate cigar I’ve ever had, my world wasn’t spinning when I got up from the chair after smoking it, but if you aren’t into full cigars yours probably would be.
Body: 9/10
Strength: 9/10
Complexity: 7/10
AFP Scale
Prelight: 2/2
Construction: 2/2
Flavor: 4/5
Value: .5/1
Total: 8.5/10
