Originally published at Tiki Bar Online
I had a great time on the Cigar Safari Trip this year and I want to thank our hosts at Drew Estate for the opportunity again.
I had some opportunity to capture some video along with all the photos I took. I wish I had 4 extra hands to take better notes and shoot video every minute, but in the end, I think the video I did shoot was some of the more interesting conversation I could have captured.
In the first video clip, Steve Saka talks about some of the many issues that Drew Estate deals with on a regular basis, including their propensity to make things more complicated for themselves, goma, Liebermans, draw testing machines, and much more. The room we were in was described as “probably the quietest place in the building” but the lights gave everything a greenish cast, there…”The Green Room.”
This next video shows a little of the process Drew Estate uses for bunching cigars. Instead of using a bunching machine (typically called a Lieberman machine), they do the entire process by hand. Steve Saka narrates as one of their top bunchers demonstrates their method, then Willy Herrera demonstrates a more traditional method that his rollers used when he worked in Miami.
