Originally published at Tiki Bar Online
Robusto, 5” x 50 ring gauge / Under $8 MSRP
At this year’s Chattanooga Tweetup I was lucky enough to be handed one of these cigars by Barry Stein, the Assistant Director of Marketing, with Miami Cigar & Company. I had heard lots of hints about this cigar from Barry through Twitter and I was very excited to try one. There will be a full press release on it next week but I can tell you the filler is comprised of two types of Dominican ligero, one type of Nicaraguan ligero, and Pennsylvania broadleaf with an Cameroon binder all covered with a Ecuadorian Sumatra wrapper. There are a lot of different countries represented here. I was able to smoke one cigar for the review.
The wrapper was a nice medium reddish brown with a tortoise shell like mottling to it. There was a good amount of tooth and oils to it as well. I normally don’t like a lot of gold but the gold on gold band on this cigar looked really sharp. When I gave the cigar a squeeze I noted that it was fairly firm but there were no soft spots to it. Once I put my nose to the wrapper I got the aroma of barnyard with a more intense barnyard coming from the foot. After clipping and taking a cold draw on it I noted the flavors of leather and sugar.
The cigar starts off with a nice red pepper spice on the tongue and retrohale, with the flavors of leather, coffee, earth, with a hint of cinnamon starting to come through after taking a few puffs on it. The draw was a little tighter than I prefer but it was definitely not too tight. The burn was slightly uneven, but that could have been the slightly gusting wind we were having while I was smoking it. As I got towards the end of this third the spice started to mellow out a bit. The cigar was at the upper end of medium in regards to strength in this third.
As I moved into the second third the spice continued to mellow out a bit. The flavors stayed pretty consistent but was a brown sugar like sweetness on the finish nicely complimenting it. The strength did build a bit into the medium full range as well. Through this third the draw opened up and the burn line pretty much evened out.
The cigar finished off strong. The flavors morphed a bit into coffee, leather, earth, cinnamon, green herbal spice and a hint of cola with the same brown sugar like sweetness on the finish. The spice started to come back although not as strong as the beginning. I did start to get a slight nicotine hit from it, but nothing too strong. The construction continued to stay spot on.
Overall I really liked this cigar. It had a good amount of flavor change with flavors that I like. I do think that it would be approachable by all except for those most sensitive to nicotine. I look forward to smoking it again and seeing what the different sizes do to the flavors.
Body: 8/10
Strength: 8/10
Complexity: 7/10
AFP Scale
Prelight: 2/2
Construction: 2/2
Flavor: 4.5/5
Value: 1/1
Total: 9.5/10
Thank you very much Keith, we are glad you enjoyed it.
Great review brother, I have heard a lot about this stick the past couple of weeks following Barry, I can’t wait to give it a try and I agree with you the Band looks pretty damn sharp!