Cigar Review: Crown Heads JD Howard Reserve

Originally published on Tiki Bar Online

HR54 (Robusto), 5″ x 54 ring gauge/ MSRP ~$9.50

While I was back in TN in August I was invited to stop by The Crowned Head’s headquarters by Wes to have a look around. If anyone visited the CAO HQ while it was in Nashville it might look familiar. The Ozgener still owns the building and using most of it for events with part of it being used as The Crowned Heads base of operations. Susie (again if you visited them before you would remember her) gave me a tour of the facilities and the changes that have been made before taking me to Jon’s office. John was gracious enough to spend some time talking to me and letting me smoke a cigar with him. When I was on my way out he handed me a few of their newest release the JD Howard Reserve. Dave did a great review of it along with all of the history of the name and the blend here. I don’t know how many I smoked before this one but I know I lit up a least a few of them.

The wrapper on this cigar is a very dark brown in color with some hints of lighter mottling. There were a few scattered veins as well. The wrapper showed lots of tooth and some minor oils. The latter probably being due to the cigars not coming in cellophane. When I gave the cigar a squeeze it was fairly firm and there were no soft spots. The wrapper gave off a light aroma of hay with a hint of barnyard coming from the foot. After clipping it and taking a cold draw on it I got some sweet maple notes with a good draw.

Once I lit up the cigar I got a fairly strong blast of red pepper spice on the tongue and retrohale. After taking a few more puffs I started to get flavors of chocolate, earth, leather and cinnamon coming through with some maple sweetness on the finish. The cigar starts off in the medium range. The draw was perfect and it produced a large volume of smoke. The burn line was a bit wavy but wasn’t anything to be concerned about. As I got to the end of this third the sweetness on the finish died down a notch.

As I moved into the second third the spice started to mellow out a bit but never went away. The chocolate flavor from the first third morphed to a coffee flavor with the leather, earth and cinnamon ones coming along. The burn straightened itself out and the draw continued to be perfect. I would say the cigar built into the upper end of medium in regards to strength through this third.

By the time I got into the final third the strength had built into the medium full range with a slight nicotine hit starting to come from it as well. The flavors stayed very similar with the sweet maple finish starting to come back.

Overall I really liked this cigar. It has a lot more rich and dark flavors than their other releases. This is definitely my favorite of their regular releases. I would recommend giving this as try when you find it.

Body: 7/10
Strength: 7/10
Complexity: 7/10

AFP Scale

Prelight: 2/2
Construction: 2/2
Flavor: 4.5/5
Value: 1/1
Total: 9.5/10