Romeo y Julieta Mille Fleurs

Posted on January 7, 2016 by atgroom under Current Production, Romeo y Julieta

I was invited to four office’s Christmas parties this year: my current workplace, two former workplaces, and the only one I am actually attending, a big tobacco company where I have some connections. They have rented out a warehouse down in the docks, and created a bastion for their product: the space is divided into two areas, the ‘outside’ (which is heated, air-conditioned, and fully enclosed by plastic sheeting), and the smaller inside, where the dance floor and the bar is. Smoking is only allowed on the outside. The inside is deserted.

There was a time when it was very common for Cuban cigar brands to have in their range multiple cigars of identical dimensions. Each of these cigars would follow the general flavour profile of the marque but, in theory at least, there would be subtle differences in their blends. The true connoisseur could not only tell the difference, but could no doubt find the perfect cigar for the moment among them. The classic example of this is Punch, which at one time had seven different cigars of the same size in their range.

All this changed in 2002. In 2000, Altadis (then a Spanish tobacco giant) had purchased a 50% share in Habanos S.A., the Cuban government quango responsible for bringing Havana cigars to the world, and the Cuban tobacco industry (along with the Cuban economy in general) was undergoing a harsh transformation from a Marxist satellite of the Soviet Union to an independent participant in the capitalist free market. Profitability was king, and the lowest common denominator had to be pandered to. Aficionados refer to this as the great dumbing down of Habanos: blends were simplified, and many of the more esoteric cigars were discontinued.

But not all. This week’s cigar is the Romeo y Julieta Mille Fleurs, a cigar that is size identical to last week’s Petit Coronas. They come in the same boxes. They wear the same bands. The only difference is the taste.

Right away, the Mille Fleurs is a very different animal to the Petit Coronas; where that cigar was mild, this one is strong and rough, brutally nutty with thick tobacco notes that leave a dryness on the back of the palate. Both cigars were purchased at the same time from the same vendor, and have lived identical lives once in my custody. I don’t know box codes or ages, so perhaps there’s something there. In any event, condition does not account for the difference.

Like most boys my age, I’ve occasionally had occasion to try a spot of internet dating, and being at this corporate tobacco soirée has brought to mind my biggest internet dating failure.

I should have known something was up from the start: her profile was an exercise in vague anonymity, a string of dark photos that did not clearly show her face, body type, or even hair colour. The description was slightly defensive essay about people who shouldn’t message her. She liked wine, travel, her cat, family and friends. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but she reached out to me. She liked my style. She’d met a lot of jerks lately and she felt I might be different. She wanted to get together for a drink. “What the hell,” I thought. “What have I got to lose?”

At the halfway point the cigar goes through a rapid series of changes; the initial nuttiness had mellowed into a strong, toasted woody note, but that rapidly turns into a bitter, ashy tar. This lasts for ten puffs or so, before it flips again, becoming very mild, strongly buttery, with a mild cedar afterword. The DNA of the Petit Coronas is there, but there are many differences: ironically, the Mille Fleurs is the less floral of the two.

We agreed on a time, and she nominated a bar, which turned out to be a brightly lit hole in the wall with high stools the only seating. It was not the kind of bar that a man goes to drink alone, and the other patrons gave me increasingly quizzical glances and I nursed my scotch and dry and waited for first ten, then twenty minutes. Twenty five minutes late she walked in, gave me a curt nod, and walked straight to the bar. She was evidentially acquainted with the bartender, because the two of them exchanged pleasantries and laughed for a few minutes before my date finally wandered over, glass of white in hand. As she did, I signaled the bartender for a refill of my now empty glass.

The girl was an angel, a perfect hapa, with the best elements from both sides of her ancestry, along with that nebulous quality that Old Groom delights to find in both women and Lanceros: elegance. She spoke with a clipped, slightly plummy accent, and held her wine with a casual but slightly practiced hand. She smiled and made eye contact. I was a little bit in love.

At around minute three of our small talk, she revealed that she was the maître d’ at a well-known Melbourne cigar and cocktail bar, and, delighted to have discovered a common interest, I volunteered that I edit a cigar encyclopaedia, and had been to many tobacco industry events at her bar. It was a slight exaggeration: I had been to the bar to smoke cigars on at least fifty occasions, sometimes with friends, but many more times with small groups of cigar enthusiasts. On three occasions I had been part of a large group organised by a tobacco vendor; twice we had a few tables booked, but were there alongside the general public. On the third occasion I was the guest of a multinational tobacco group and they booked the place out.

She cocked her head and gave a pained smile. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to call you out on that one.” I was taken aback. “What?”
“I’ve taken every booking in the last five years, and I don’t recall a tobacco industry group ever coming through.” Shaken and defensive, I began to stammer through the names of the cigar store owners that I had been there with, and she acquiesced, plainly not buying it. Our conversation was downhill after that. Feeling like I’d been caught in a lie I was the worst combination of awkward, nervous, and snide. Having made her mind up about me she was cold and haughty. Two minutes later she gave another pained smile. “Look, this isn’t going very well, is it?” I laughed.
“No, well, you kind of called me a liar a minute ago, it’s hard to come back from that.”
“I’m going to go.”

She polished off her drink, picked up her bag, waved to the bartender and left. My new drink arrived five seconds later. Our date had lasted less than ten minutes. I haven’t been to Supper Club since.

Half an inch from the end I encounter a flavour I’ve never had in a cigar before, the distinct salty tang of smoked tuna. It lasts for a few puffs before settling into the familiar bitter finish. The Mille Fleurs is a fine cigar, but not as good a Petit Coronas.

Romeo y Julieta Mille Fleurs on the Cuban Cigar Website

Romeo y Julieta Petit Coronas

Posted on January 1, 2016 by atgroom under Current Production, Romeo y Julieta

And so, as it is wont to do, the great wheel of time has turned. We who were lifted on its spokes have had six months of adventure, of journeys great and small, of loves won and lost, and we have been deposited back; back at the height of the Australian summer, back at the open lid of the half-full humidor, and back at the start of a new season of A Harem of Dusky Beauties.

Welcome.

As our ancient customs dictate, I shall, over the coming weeks and months, examine one of the great Havana tobacco houses: in this case, Romeo y Julieta. As always, I begin the horizontal with the marque’s lowliest member, so that I might have a marker to compare her most exalted special releases against, and by doing so provide the consumer with useful purchasing advice. So it is then, that the Romeo y Julieta Petit Coronas today must burn.

The first puffs are very mild, with no hint of bitterness from the heat of lighting. It is strongly herbaceous, vegetal even, with something of the compost heap in there, and the tang of five dollar chardonnay.

Romeo is one of the great old marques, with a history dating back to the 1850s. As recently as fifteen years ago it was a powerhouse, the second highest selling brand behind Montecristo, but unlike H. Upmann and Partagás, the subjects of my last two verticals, Romeo is a brand on the decline. More than any other, Romeo has suffered from the rise of Cohiba. In a world of conspicuous consumption, the consumer of today is more interested in the cigar of Jay-Z than a brand that bases its marketing around a 75 year old association with Winston Churchill, and is named for a play whose principal conflict seems trivial in the age of sexting. Each Romeo dress box is emblazoned with 16 gold medals, the hallmarks of her pedigree. The most recent was awarded in 1900.

More than most brands, Romeo suffered during the great rationalisation of 2002, when Habanos S.A. tried to make the line-up more approachable for the neophyte. Fifteen cigars were wiped out that year, although it was not all without justification, to be honest; five of the discontinued models were variations on the petit corona, and even today there are still two other cigars in the catalogue with the exact same dimensions as the one I am smoking, and several others that are so close you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without a ruler and a gauge measuring tool.

The real problem began in the late 2000s though, when Romeo lost her mother factory, and production of the cigars was split amongst many workshops all over the island. Consistency fell. Quality fell. In 2015, Romeo y Julieta cigars just aren’t very good any more.

All that said, the Romeo No. 2 in a tube is still the cigar you are second most likely to find in a liquor store or petrol station, ceding only to the Montecristo 4.

At the midway point the cigar still trends mild, with a slightly spicy, buttery note. Somewhere in there I detect a hint of wildflowers, the sweetness of a daisy filled meadow, along with the stinging chlorophyll that those blossoms emit.

Typically I enjoy my dusky beauties alone, not because in the company of like-minded fellows is not an objectively better way to enjoy a fine Havana, but because in that environment I find myself too distracted by ribald anecdotes to really examine the finer points of flavour tasting notes that this column demands, and I am nothing if not devoted to my craft. Today, however, is a rare exception.

I began the morning with a long bath and a brief vomit, the accrued debt of an evening that ended at the bottom of a bottle of Johnny Walker Red in a karaoke bar at 4:00am. I wanted nothing so much as to spend the day in bed, but being a man who follows through on his commitments, I dragged myself down the street toward a revitalizing bowl of wonton noodle soup and then a bar where several of my cigar aficionado brethren were meeting to smoke on the rooftop terrace.

I found them on a secluded table in a little crow’s nest above the bar proper, and soon felt much revived, first by a Bloody Mary and then by the first puffs of a Cohiba Siglo III. Before long though, our serenity was interrupted by the hostess, who explained very apologetically that we would have to move; there was a baby shower happening down wind of us, and the expectant mother was none to pleased. The hostess moved us to a shared table in the centre of the main bar. The place was packed, and our new table sat under a shade cloth, and even I, as unrepentant a smoker as exists in this world, felt some pangs of guilt as I watched every exhalation get caught by the cloth and funnelled directly into the indoor section of the bar. Before too long the hostess returned: we were bounced. As we skulked out another patron, no doubt the complainant who had triggered our eviction, could not resist a parting jab: “it really is disgusting, you know. It’s going to kill you.”

And so we have adjourned to the courtyard of my private residence, where the whisky is cheaper and the aggrieved parties fewer and less vocal. Even here though, the smoke is under threat. If there is any ongoing theme to this season of The Harem, it will be my struggle with the owner’s corporation, an existential battle for the last sanctuary of the smoking man. It is not our world anymore.

For today though, the sun shines, the whisky glows with a certain inner warmth, and the pungent smoke of five Havana cigars wafts skyward.

In the final inch or so the Petit Coronas grows bitter, losing all flavour to the rubber fire. While very pleasant for an entry level, and setting a strong standard for the exotics to be compared against, it’s not as good as a Monte 4.

Romeo y Julieta Petit Coronas on the Cuban Cigar Website

On Hiatus

Posted on July 8, 2015 by atgroom under Uncategorized

Update: The hiatus referred to below ended on January 1st 2016.

Inevitably, indubitably, time marches on. The seasons have changed, and each morning now I awake to find that the frigid wind that howls in from the blasted Southern tundra has filled my ashtray anew with snow, and hung vicious icicles from my wicker smoking chair. So it is that I must purge my lighter, lock my humidor, send my smoking jacket to the cleaners, and turn my attention to other follies. Season three of A Harem of Dusky Beauties has concluded.

It shall return, of course: perhaps when I spy the first spouts of new born whale calves migrating past the heads, or when I am awakened by the delicate aroma of summer fruits on the gnarled tree outside my window, or perhaps when, lying together on the fresh cut grass of spring, my ladylove nuzzles my neck and whispers “can we stay like this forever?”

“No” I will callously reply. “I need a smoke.”

I suggest that you subscribe to the RSS feed.

Until we meet again, old friends, may all your smoke rings be round.

-A

Cohiba Piramides Extra

Posted on July 1, 2015 by atgroom under Cohiba, Current Production

With the winter chill long descended, but my self-imposed obligation to this column not quite expended, I have been reduced to this: it is Tuesday night and I am hunkered in my kitchen. The ashtray rests on the cooktop so that the range hood might extract as much smoke as possible. I am clothed entirely in silk because of a misguided idea I have that it doesn’t take on the smell of smoke (the reason that it is the traditional material of smoking jackets). A smoke blanket hangs across the doorway in the vain hope that the odour will be isolated to just this room. Upstairs my bed is stripped in a vain effort to preserve the sheets. In truth, it’s a very comfortable way to enjoy a cigar, but the aftermath will not be pretty. This is the last dusky beauty I will smoke this season.

For this finale I have selected a Cohiba Piramides Extra from the original release in 2012. All cigars vary from year to year, but generally the first release is about as good as they get. Some first releases are legendary (the 2003 Siglo VI being the most famous example), while others are only great in comparison to the depths their descendants sink (Maduro 5 line, BHKs). I guess Cuba just tries a little bit harder in the first year.

At first light the cigar is toasty, with a strong, dry grass aftertaste. The tobacco is a light to medium. In true Cohiba style the smoke is incredibly smooth and rich. It tastes like class. My soft spot for Cohiba is well known; I don’t have the words to articulate exactly what it is that makes them special, but I’d like to think that words aren’t necessary. Smoke a Cohiba, you’ll see. Even the worst of them have a quality that is self-evident, that is beyond language.

Of my various sojourns abroad, my time in Japan bore a marked difference to my time in China. In China, my friends were rich as hell and, all earning western salaries in a country where you can feed a family of four for less than the cost of an ice-cream in Australia, we lived like kings, never giving the first thought to vile money. In Japan my friends were all broke. They were English teachers in the main, all living paycheque to paycheque, and those paycheques came monthly. It was the last Saturday of the month, and so I found myself alone on a Saturday night. My own existence was that of a hermit, prowling a huge apartment above a strip club by day, talking to myself. There was no way I was staying in on a Saturday night.

Japan is the kind of country where it is easy to make friends. In Australia strangers are predators: a man sitting alone in a park drinking a beer is a maniac to be shunned and avoided. In Japan the attitude is very different: he is a brother, a fellow imbiber, to be embraced and incorporated into your evening. So it was that I headed to Triangle Park, an isosceles of concrete in the heart of Osaka’s America-town. The ‘park’ sits in the middle of the nightlife district and there is a convenience store across the road that sells canned cocktails for $1, and so it naturally becomes a central congregation point for the aimless youth. If nothing else I could at least check out some girls in short skirts.

I was halfway through my fourth Cocktail Partner when I heard my name being called. It was a group of locals who evidentially knew me from some past debauchery or other. To be honest, I recalled them only barely (if at all), but who was I to quibble? We shared a drink and a cigarette, and they invited me to join them in a nearby club where a DJ they liked was playing.

The club was loud and warm, a maelstrom of writhing bodies. The DJ was good, but the VJ, who ran clips from films and psychedelic patterns in time with the music on large screens around the dance floor, was better. I soon lost my friends, and then myself, to the music; writhing in the dark, enjoying the sound and light, the heat, the smell and the viscera of other bodies.

Over time I became conscious of one particular body that had entered and remained in my close orbit, my pelvis contacting her warm rump at the zenith of my thrusts, the scent of her shampoo in my nostrils. Gradually, my incidental contact became deliberate: my caresses more lingering. With every contact she gave the palpable feeling of reciprocation; she would follow my movements, and embrace them, move into me as I moved into her. Finally I removed the subterfuge, and placed my hands around her waist, and she ground herself against me, tracing my erection with her arse.

I needed to piss, but I held it until things reached crisis point, and I whispered one of my three Japanese phrases in her ear: “chotto matte (one moment).” When I returned she wasn’t where I’d left her, and I looked around, panicked: I knew her only by touch, by smell: I hadn’t seen her face. Moments later though she was there, and hand in hand we moved to the dark recesses at the edge of the floor, and kissed passionately in the French style. Soon the moment felt right, and I deployed the second of my Japanese phrases, “ikimashouka (let’s go).”

Outside it was pouring rain, and my $2 plastic umbrella was in no way adequate to shelter two people for the ten or so block walk back to my apartment. I tried “eigo ga hanasemasuka,” my final phrase, but was met with a blank shaking of the head. I showed her my ID card with my address, attempting to indicate that it wasn’t far, but Japanese addresses don’t make any sense to any body, and it didn’t help my cause. Eventually I hailed a cab. We passed the five minute drive in awkward silence. Human affection was the only tongue we had in common, and the back seat of a Japanese cab is no place for that.

She looked very suspicious when we pulled up outside my building (and rightly so, as to all external indications it contained nothing but hostess bars and massage parlours), but entered nonetheless, and soon we were canoodling on my bed. I began to tug at her shirt, and she stopped me to unleash a great torrent of Japanese. I responded with a look of incomprehension, and throwing “chotto matte” back at me she began to rummage in her bag, eventually producing a pocket translator. She typed away on it for ages, and eventually handed it over with a paragraph of incomprehensible English word salad on the screen. I laughed and shook my head, and accepting defeat she pointed at the light. “No.” This I understood.

We made love in the dark, with her whimpering in the classic Japanese porno style. We slept curled up together, the language of affection knowing no culture. In the morning I walked her to the train station, to the Sakai line, a city to the south of Osaka. I gave her my phone to put her number in, and there I finally learnt her name: Takako. Before she left she managed to ask my age, and told me her own: she was twenty one, four years younger than I was. She had her friend text me later that day, and for a week or so we messaged back and forth. She told me she was learning English for me. Eventually, though, it petered out, and I never saw her again. Ours was a relationship that could not be sustained through texts.

Mid-way through the cigar is creamy, the smoke luscious. The grassy flavour is still dominant, although a bit earthier than it was, more cut lawn than dry hay. Behind it there is the hearty aroma of old saddles. The strength has thickened a little, trending towards medium. The class remains.

Like all good stories, Takako’s has a sequel. It was eight years later and 7,000km away, and I was at the time of my life where I had a wedding every weekend – in fact, on this particular weekend I had two. The first was in a garden in the afternoon, where a high school chum was marrying a Japanese girl. It was a quiet affair for family and intimates, and there wasn’t a reception per se, but there were drinks and canapés in the garden afterward. After those the bridal party were going out to dinner, but later in the evening the younger folks were invited to meet at their hotel suite for further libations. I have always lived by a very simple motto: “when you say ‘no’ to champagne you say ‘no’ to life,” and next to the rose bushes the bubbly stuff was flowed freely. By the time I headed to the second wedding of the day, my sails were full, and cut toward the breeze.

The second wedding of the day was a Russian affair: in truth, it was a reception, not a wedding. The wedding had been that afternoon in an Orthodox church somewhere, and had involved, someone told me, “a lot of great hats.” The event I arrived at was in a Russian reception centre in the eastern suburbs. Every table was laden with plates of cured meats and smoked fishes and, in addition to both colours of wine, each had its own bottle of vodka embedded in a block of ice. I wasn’t too hungry – I was filled with bubbles and hors d’oeuvres – but I was certainly in the mood to drink, and there were plenty willing to share a vodka shot with me. Before long I was on the dance floor bewitching a group of gorgeous Russian girls with my Michael Jacksonesque kicks and spins. We had not quite gotten to the hora when the bridegroom came over and told me I had to leave: apparently the girls fell under the jurisdiction of a table of Ukrainian mobsters, and their tolerance for my antics was quickly diminishing.

By the time I arrived at the hotel I felt great: I had enough drinks under my belt to fell a man twice my size, but somehow it was working for me. Perhaps it was all the smoked fish. The suite was large, and from the little entrance hall I had a good view of both rooms. In the lounge room my school friends sprawled languidly, their ties undone, drinking whiskey and telling jokes. In the bedroom eight Japanese girls in party frocks sat on a row on the end of the bed, facing an empty chair. I stuck my head into the lounge room for just long enough for my friends to smile welcomingly and for me to call them “homos” before I headed for the bedroom chair.

The girls were happy to see me and giggled at my jokes, and for a while I conducted it like a seminar, taking questions from the panel. Before too long the bride wanted her seat back and I found myself locked in conversation with one girl in particular. Her name was Takae, which sounds a lot like the Japanese word for “expensive,” and we instantly had a rapport. We talked for hours, and I left that night with her number in my phone. Over the next few months we become a romantic couple; there was something familiar in the way she whimpered when we made love, but I just put in down to my own cultural biases. “All Japanese girls are the same,” I thought to myself.

About a month into our relationship we got to the subject of family and where she was from, and it emerged that she grew up in Sakai, a city just south of Osaka. She had one sister, four years younger than herself. I didn’t instantly recognise the name when she told me. “Takako” I said, mulling it over. “I think I knew somebody called that.” I turned red when I put it together. “Does she speak English as well as you do?” I asked. “Yes,” came the response. “She was very lazy in high school and didn’t learn it at all, but when she was twenty one she really liked a western guy and she learnt it for him. You will probably meet her. She’s coming to stay with me in a month.”

We broke up shortly thereafter.

In the final third I begin to get a serious head spin. The cigar is full and tangy, and a little sour on the back pallet. There is a slight bitterness. I have been drinking, of course: first a whiskey sour, then a daiquiri, perhaps 100ml of brown spirits in all, but that in no way accounts for how woozy I feel. This cigar has some punch.

Like all good cigars, I take it till I burn my fingers. The Cohiba Piramides Extra. Delightful.

See you next year.

Cohiba Piramides Extra on the Cuban Cigar Website

La Corona Panetelas

Posted on June 17, 2015 by atgroom under Discontinued, La Corona

On a long enough timeline everything becomes exotic. We’ve had discontinued cigars on The Harem before, but never a discontinued brand. La Corona was once a fine house, producing the very best in premium cigars; once in a while you see a cigar butt half smoked by Winston Churchill go to auction, and when you do it’s usually a La Corona. Romeo may get the credit, but La Corona is what the big man really smoked. The La Corona factory is no longer in the same colonial building that was built in 1904 to house their production, but the modern incarnation still bears the old name, and is still the largest factory in Cuba. The once proud marque of La Corona though, is done. It has been done since 1979. When the brand reappeared in the 1990s it was a shadow of its former self, nine cellophane wrapped machine made small cigars, little better than the Belinda of today. It was gone within a decade. Today’s dusky beauty is one from this era, a La Corona Panetelas. On a long enough timeline everything becomes exotic.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever smoked a plastic wrapped cigar before – it takes me a minute to figure out that the red band is a pull tab that separates the plastic into halves. The wrapper is brutal, a mess of spots and lumps, peaks and valleys. The tip is nice though, a hot bullet, almost too conical to open with my nail. I get there in the end. Once lit it begins a little tannic, with a lot more force than you’d expect from a quarter century old machine made. Min Ron Nee describes these cigars as very mild, and maybe they were in 1995, but in 2015 this one has some guts.

As a youth I identified a lot with the Tom Cruise character in Risky Business: I was young and timid, my parents had a great house and went on trips a lot, and I never really saw any huge moral problem with hiring sharp featured prostitutes with legs that went all the way down to the floor. As time went by things changed: I did a business degree, developed a lot of unrealised aspirations, and formed close bonds with older mentors who would ultimately betray me. I also had a penchant for poetry. In short, I became Tom Cruise from Cocktail. There was also a period when I was really into volleyball, but the less said about that the better.

There is a point to all my ‘80s movie jokes, which is that in addition to being a world class cigar aficionado, a decent computer programmer, and a mediocre author of bawdy anecdotes, I’m also pretty good at mixing drinks; in fact, I have one with me today in the form of a sports bottle full of ice and Savoy Milk Punch No. 1. True fact: in the novel that Cocktail is based off (also named Cocktail), the two main characters bartend while they aspire to be novelists, not plutocrats. All that Wall Street business stuff was added just because it was the ‘80s and making bank was popular.

I think I’m starting to understand what they mean when they refer to the ‘90s La Corona cigars as very mild, because the tobacco flavour and the level of nicotine are really both very light. That said, the amount of flavour, the pure volume of tastebuds that are stimulated and the length that flavour persists on the palette is anything but. There is a strong kick of oak and fruit, the first mouthful of cheap white wine. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it is very distinct and anything but mild. I can feel it coating my mouth in a thin layer of viscous film.

About halfway through the cigar goes through as drastic and sudden a flavour change as I’ve ever encountered. The white wine oak disappears, leaving behind it a mild creamy coffee. Somewhere behind that is a hint of tobacco, the first I’ve seen in this cigar.

The Savoy Cocktail Book is one of the quintessential old cocktail books, first emerging as a manual for the bartenders at the Savoy Hotel in London’s American Bar in the 1920s, and being periodically supplemented and rereleased since then. It contains over a thousand recipes, although almost all of them are slight variations on a martini. In the very back there is a section on punches, and one of those is the Milk Punch No. 1.

The idea of a milk punch is that you take a bunch of fruit, herbs, spices, and sugar and leave it to marinate in brandy and rum for a few days. Once sufficiently infused you strain out the chunks and add lemon juice and lightly heated milk. When the milk touches the booze and the citrus it curdles, and the curdling process acts as a kind of filter, pulling the impurities out of the booze. Several days of straining follow, but once you have successfully filtered the cheese out you are left with a clear, glowing punch. It’s hard to say how alcoholic it is: the extracted cheese smells like somebody spilled a bottle of metho, while the punch tastes like a child’s breakfast drink, but half a bottle is definitely enough to noticeably lift my spirits.

I made this batch a few days ago: four litres for a party that only ten people attended. My Risky Business days are long behind me. Concealed in my sports flask it should remain undetected unless law enforcement do a specific gravity test. Through the bulk of the cigar the mild pineapple flavour has complimented but not overpowered the tobacco’s flavour. During the bitter final third it is sufficient to take the edge off the tar.

The La Corona finishes a little bitter, but is none the weaker for it. Flavoursome and punchy, this delivers far more than you would expect from a twenty year old, low cost machine made. For what it’s worth, I would say that the La Corona is better than the Quintero Favoritos, the closest comparable modern cigar that has graced these pages. If you have the means I highly recommend you pick one up.

La Corona Panetelas on the Cuban Cigar Website

Montecristo Petit Edmundo

Posted on June 10, 2015 by atgroom under Current Production, Montecristo

It is a crisp winter’s day in the docks, and a rare appearance of the sun has drawn me out for a cigar. Although the orb is shining the day is not warm, and something short is called for lest my fingers go numb holding it: the order of the day is a well-aged Montecristo Petit Edmundo from 2008.

The fact that this cigar has reached a stage where it could be considered “well aged” comes as something of a shock to me; I still consider the Edmundo to be the controversial new kid on the block, and the petite version came out a few years after that did. Quite without noticing it, time appears to have passed me by.

The cigar is bitter from first light, with a sour aftertaste. There is a bean element, dry espresso: it is the aroma of a bag of coffee beans more than it is the flavour of the brewed stuff.

It’s an odd sensation, approaching the age that your parents were when you first knew them: you begin to see their actions (which at the time seemed to be the inscrutable follies of the gods) in the light of your own ridiculous antics, and they begin to make a lot more sense.

The event that I think of as my first memory took place in the town of Goroka, deep in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. I am sure that it is a manufactured memory, implanted from years of hearing the tale told by my mother whenever she needed an example of my father’s gross brutality; there is no way that I would have been allowed to witness the events in question, and it’s debatable whether or not I was even born at the time. Nevertheless, thirty some years later I can envision it quite clearly.

The highlands of the Papua were a wild place in the 1980s (as they are today). Cannibalism had only been officially stamped out a decade or so earlier, and it was not uncommon for spear wielding men in war paint to flag down cars on the highway and demand a toll for passing through their area. The kina was the official currency, but real transactions – dowries, bribes, ransoms and whatnot – were all conducted in pigs. There were a lot of dogs about and, although they were domesticated in the sense that they hung around the houses and depended on humans for food, they did not have owners as we understand them in the west.

There was one dog in particular that my family thought of as ours, a blonde vaguely Labrador looking mongrel that my mother had christened Crumpet. Our house was on stilts in the Queenslander style, and underneath it was a great pile of junk, the discarded odds and ends of several previous occupants. I have a distinct memory of being taken down there to see Crumpet, who, heavily pregnant, had lain down on some old newspapers to begin her labours. I remember her panting, looking up at me with her eyes, not able or willing to lift her head.

I have an image, too, of after the birth; of a pile of nine pink, hairless puppies clambering over each other to suckle from their mother’s teat. The final image is of my father. As I recall it he and my mother had a heated debate before he finally declared that “there were enough mangy strays in the world,” and headed under the house. Crumpet raised her head weakly as he found an old hessian sack amongst the junk pile, her look turning to confusion as he scooped up her puppies one by one and placed them in it. She did not resist: she trusted him.

I watched from the veranda as he filled an old tin bucket with water and carried it out into the backyard. He dumped the hessian sack in it unceremoniously, and held it underwater for a minute or so, presumably until he felt the movement stop. For reasons unknown he emptied the corpses out onto the grass and left them in the sun to dry while he dug the hole: nine little pink balls, their wispy blonde fur bedraggled in the sunlight.

Of course, none of it is real. The family annals are vague on dates, but at most I would have been two years old at the time of the puppy incident; a slobbering infant, rather than the stoic figure I picture watching the massacre dispassionately from the back veranda, Napoleon in OshKosh B’gosh. Nevertheless, old brains play tricks, and that one is mine: a vivid recollection of dead dogs. As I recall Crumpet got over it well enough, but always gave my father a wide berth from then on.

Halfway through the cigar the bitterness has subsided. It is still a little sour, but main note is a muddy sort of earthiness. There is also some straw involved. Years after the puppy incident, now living in China, my older sister tried to build a mud brick house in the back yard (no doubt inspired by the mud huts of the Papuan highlands). She only got one wall about two foot high before a big rain disolved the thing, but my sense memory remains, and this one is real. The flavour in this cigar is the smell of my sister’s mud bricks drying in the sun.

My phone rings: it’s a recruiter, and it takes me ten minutes or so to dislodge him. When I return to the cigar it has gone out. Once relit, it is very bitter, but with one of the most distinct black jelly-bean aniseed flavours I have ever had in a cigar.

The very end is bitter tar, underpinned by a deeply aromatic herb, star anise, perhaps. I smoke it till I can’t smoke no more. At all times the Montecristo Petit Edmundo was rough, brutish almost. Even at seven years old it could still use a decade or so more in the dark.

Nonetheless, a very decent effort from old Montecristo. Better than a No. 4.

Montecristo Petit Edmundo on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Quintero Favoritos

Posted on June 3, 2015 by atgroom under Current Production, Quintero

An interesting facet of the Habanos portfolio is that the closest things they have to mass market cigars – the Montecristo No. 4, the PSD4, and the Romeo No. 1 et al – are actually from ancient and prestigious luxury brands. If you’re in the market for a cigar from Nicaragua’s second most prestigious producer you will only find it only in a locked display cabinet in a specialist cigar shop. If you want a Monte 4 you can buy it at a well-stocked petrol station. If you do find a Nicaraguan cigar next to the Mobil 1, it won’t be an Arturo Funete, but some anonymous trash you’ve never heard of.

Cuba, however, does have cigars that are specifically pitched as low cost, low quality cigars. Today’s dusky beauty, which rings up at less than half the cost of a Montecristo No. 4, is the lowliest cigar to ever grace these pages, the Quintero Favoritos. There is no petrol station in the world that carries Quintero: if you want one you’ll have to find a high end Habanos specialist. It’s an interesting paradigm: only the true connoisseurs smoke the shit.

The cigar begins very well, with extremely light tobacco and a hint of black tea. This is a short-filler cigar, the first to ever grace these pages. In a long filler cigar, whole leaves are bunched up and then wrapped in other whole leaves. In a short-filler cigar, small trimmings are bunched up, and then wrapped in a couple of whole leaves. A whole tobacco leaf will have a natural progression in nicotine levels and flavours as it travels from foot to tip, and long filler cigars exploit this. The scraps that make up short filler cigars come from many different leaves, and therefore if the flavours change it will be sudden and erratic, not the stately metamorphosis of their premium sisters. Traditionally short-filler cigars are also a bit looser and hence burn a hotter and rougher, which also kills the nuances a bit.

I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on a box of Quinteros. I was still young in my cigar journey, as I was in life (I was about twenty three). I was working as an IT contractor, and my boss asked me to come meet a potential client and pitch for an idea they wanted to build. Their office was the top floor of a small tower in the heart of the city. The office I worked out of at the time was a converted warehouse that didn’t put a lot of emphasis on the conversion: our desks were rickety salvage pieces picked up from the hard rubbish, the computers were not much better, and there were meandering cracks between the floorboards that in the worst places could accommodate a ping pong ball. The office we visited that day was the total opposite: everything bedecked in black marble, dark wood and leather. The company was named Steeple Mortuary Services and they were a corporate behemoth in the funeral business, even though nobody had ever heard of them. They owned a number of smaller, specialised funeral parlour brands, and as the parent company they provided the group with shared services like a morgue, HR, accounting, and the software package we were to build.

Unlike my own open plan wasteland, every employee at this company had their own enclosed office. There was space for twenty, but as we walked around the floor I counted three that were occupied. I later found out that they had an identical office in Sydney and most of the staff had desks in both places. We were shown into the boardroom and seated in comfortable leather seats at the 20 person single piece table. On one wall there was a large plasma screen TV (the height of luxury in those days), and beneath it a full wet bar with every kind of booze imaginable. When the CEO, Ken, a heavyset, cheerful sort of fellow walked in, the first thing he did was offer us a drink. My boss was a bit of a wowser, and balked at the idea of alcohol at 11:30am, but I had no such qualms, and accepted his offer of a scotch a Coke – the whisky was Johnny Black, poured from a 4.5L bottle in a cradle.

About an inch in the cigar gives off an unusual note of dirty spice; clove or maybe cardamom, perhaps turmeric. It is thickening up, and by the mid-point it is quite punchy, just a notch or two below strong. There is a thick note of coffee and leather. True to prediction this has been a quick smoke: the halfway point falls barely 30 minutes in.

The system he wanted to build would be pitched today at a start-up incubator as “Uber for corpses.” In 2015 it would be a fairly straightforward smartphone app, but in 2005 it was revolutionary. The idea was that they would have unmarked vans driving the streets of the city at all times. When a hospital or nursing home had a corpse that needed picking up, they would visit a web page and log their address and some details about the deceased. The system would then figure out which driver was closet (via their last known whereabouts – GPS units were available, but they weren’t at a stage where they could be communicate with a web service), and instruct them to pick up the corpse (via SMS). Once the corpse was in hand it would be taken to Steeple’s central mortuary where someone would pick up a phone and notify the next of kin that they had the body and offer them a funeral. If they had another funeral parlour they’d rather use that was no problem, the body would be transferred for free, but Ken didn’t think many people would do that: the whole thing was a gigantic marketing manoeuvre, and one that he was very confident would pay off.

After Ken had laid everything out he left me and my boss alone for a while to discuss our solution, and then brought us into his private office to discuss it: this was the pitch, where the job would be lost or won. I was just the boffin, really: it was my boss’ job to do the selling, and so I sat, only half listening, my gaze wandering around the office. He had some interesting stuff in there, some ivory and more exotic booze, but as a blossoming cigar aficionado my gaze fell foremost on the box of Quintero Panatelas in the centre of the desk. It was a brand I’d never heard of before, but it was Cuban and I was intrigued.

About half an hour into the pitch Ken pulled out a pack of cigarettes and asked if we minded if he smoked. My boss wrinkled his nose: “I don’t think it’s legal to smoke in offices anymore.”
Ken was disgusted, “you’re going to force me out on the balcony? You don’t smoke at all?”
“No.”
“How about if you’re at a party and someone starts handing around a bit of choof?”
“No.”
He shook his head and looked at me. “How about you mate? You smoke?”
“Choof at a party? Definitely.”
This pleased him. “How about ciggies?”
“Ah, not really, but I like a good cigar.”
Quick as a flash he handed me a Quintero, took one for himself and, with a parting sneer over his shoulder at my boss, ushered me out onto the balcony.

We must have been out there for about thirty minutes, cracking jokes and telling tall tales while my boss glared at us through the window. Finally Ken tossed his nub carelessly over the balcony onto the sidewalk below, and leaned in conspiratorially. “Mate, if I sign with you guys, will I be dealing mostly with you, or with him in there?”
“Just me… I do all the actual work, he’s just the salesman.”
“Yeah, good. I just want to deal with a human being, y’know.”

Needless to say, we got the gig.

The cigar ends full and rich, with plenty of tar and not too much else, but it’s not too unpleasant for it. Total smoking time was around three quarters of an hour. All things considered this is a very decent cigar that holds its own with my base comparison cigars, the Monte 4 and PSD4, and substantially beats out the Upmann Petite Coronas. Given that it costs half or less than any of those, it is probably the best value for money cigar coming out of Cuba today.

Quintero Favoritos on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Trinidad Ingenios Edición Limitada 2007

Posted on May 27, 2015 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Trinidad

With the end of the season soon upon us and my main series for the year long concluded, The Harem has reached a bit of a doldrums. I hesitate to smoke too dusky a beauty as I feel that the most precious cigars should be saved to burn alongside their sisters in some future series, and yet, the raison d’être of this column is the objective comparison of the rarest of collectable cigars. The net result is this: today’s cigar, the Trinidad Ingenios Edición Limitada 2007, chosen more or less by random chance.

With a 42 ring gauge, the Ingenios is the thinnest Edición Limitada released to date and, if current trends continue, it will remain the thinnest for a long while to come (2014 featured a 58 ring, 2015 has a 56). It’s a lovely looking thing, with a glossy chocolate wrapper and pigtail. It feels good in the hand, an elegant aristocratic smoke. Trinidad is not a brand I’ve ever really come to; for some reason the packaging makes me think of them as light cigars with a sweet, cinnamon and nutmeg bouquet. I don’t know why: that’s not at all what they taste like, but the false expectation nonetheless leaves me disappointed. This one begins very far from that place, strong and punchy, full tobacco with coffee and chocolate from the get go.

Trinidad, of course, is named for the Cuban town a few hours down the coast from Havana, a place we have visited before in these pages. It’s a seminal town in my cigar smoking life: I visited very early on my first trip to Cuba, and the run down domestic production factory on the outskirts of town was the first cigar factory that I ever set foot in. Behind the factory I bought a newspaper wrapped bundle of corona gordas from one of the rollers for two convertible pesos – a deal both parties were delighted with. Without the paperwork required for export, I had no choice but to smoke three of those cigars a day for the next two weeks, and left Cuba thoroughly enchanted by the leaf. It was also in Trinidad where I met the Australians.

I was sitting in a café with a friend drinking a Malta (a revolting Cuban malt extract soda), and complaining loudly about it in my broad Australian accent when I was addressed from behind by a tourist in equally broad ‘Strine. “That sounds like the mother tongue!” he said. “Where’re you blokes from?”

He turned out to live three streets over from the house I grew up in, and was traveling in Cuba with his British wife. They were about five years older than my friend and I; and quickly became friends, not because of any real shared interest, but because we seemed to run into them everywhere we went. I saw them every day that I was in Trinidad, and then a few days later in Cienfuegos, and a few days after that in Santiago. They showed up at the bus station as we departed for Havana, and we spent eight hours on the overnight coach not two feet away from them. They had become something of a joke between my friend and I: were they ASIO agents, we wondered, sent by our government to monitor our exposure to communist ideologies?

Mid-way through the Ingenios is very mild with a slight milkiness, not quite cream, but it leaves the lactic shock on the palette. There is the barest hint of promised nutmeg and, somewhere in the back there, a shadow of chocolate remains. An excellent smoke.

We had some respite from the Australians in Havana: we still saw them occasionally, but Havana is a big city and there were more places to hide. Things got really weird the next week though when we arrived in Mexico and found them in the hotel room next to us. Up to this point our relationship had been fairly casual: the odd shared drink, the occasional joke, but in Mexico we went sight-seeing together. “What are you guys up to today” the male had asked over buffet breakfast. We told him we were heading off to see the pyramids at Teotihuacán and he asked if they could join us. “Sure, why not?” They seemed friendly enough.

Mexico City sits at a famously high altitude: every guide book warns you to take it easy on your first few days there while your body adapts. It was extremely hot that day, a full sun beating down, and the pyramids at Teotihuacán are a heck of a climb. We were halfway up the Pyramid of the Sun by the time the woman started to complain. Long and loud, she protested, a sing song childish whine. She wanted to go down. She wanted a bottle of water. Eventually the guy gave us an apologetic look and said they’d meet us at the bottom.

When we saw them at the base of the monument an hour or so later, her complaints seemed to have escalated into an argument, and we were grateful when they told us to climb the Pyramid of the Moon alone and meet them at the entrance when we were ready to go. By the time we saw them again two hours later they were deep in a full blown domestic.

For most the bus ride through the slums they kept their bickering to muffled hisses, but once we got to the subway, away from the English speaking ears of the tourists, they erupted into an unbridled screaming match. She would say something, a complaint, and he would ignore her. Then she would repeat it, and accuse him of ignoring her, and then add another complaint, and so on until finally he snapped at her, at which point she would wail and scream until he yelled at her, at which point she would sulk for a few minutes before making another complaint and repeating the process ad nauseam. At one stage a camera was thrown. If there had been any plates around I’m sure they would have been broken. My friend and I were mortified, but what could we do? We were trapped on a train, and headed for the same destination. We rolled our eyes at each other at every repetition of the cycle, every carping over of the same tired points.

When finally we arrived back at the Zócalo and immediately made our excuses. “You guys go back” my friend said “we’re going to go get some dinner.”
“Oh, sounds good!” the guy replied. “Where are you going?” My friend looked at me desperately. It was imperative we not spend another minute with these dreadful people.
“Look, if I’m honest, we’re going to find some whores.” I said. “I’ve never been with a Hispanic woman and I really want to do it before I leave Mexico. We’re just going to head to the worst part of town and hang around until they find us.” He took a long look at his wife, and I think honestly considered coming with us: anything was better than the night of bickering he had in store for him back at the hotel.
“Ha, alright, you guys have fun” he said eventually.

The next morning he knocked on our door bright and early. “So sorry about yesterday, guys” he said. “I love her, but she’s just a real bitch sometimes, y’know?” We murmured vague kind of disagreement you murmur when politeness dictates that you have to disagree with something you entirely agree with.
“Hey, I was wondering, do you guys have any room in your bags? Could you take some stuff back to Australia for us?” He proffered a brown paper package about the size of two keys of black tar heroin.
“It’s just a camping stove and some souvenirs… we’ve got another month of trekking in front of us, and we won’t need them anymore. You can open it if you like.” Taking pity on the poor bastard and wanting to get him out of my room, I instantly agreed.
“No problem. No need to open it, I trust you.”

With a bit over an inch to go the chocolate is back in force. The tobacco strength is full, with heavy nicotine, and there is a smoky tar involved, but it’s sweet rather than sour tar. A bittersweet chocolate bomb.

After twenty five hours or so in the air we arrived at Cairns International Airport and when the customs officer saw the Mexican stamp in my passport he sent me straight to the inspection line. The officer on inspection duty was a young, jolly sort of fellow, who I think must have been fresh from training as he did the most thorough job of a bag inspection I have ever seen. Socks were unrolled. The pages of my books we thumbed through. Eventually, of course, he got to the brown paper package.
“What’s this?” The first questions he had asked me were “are you carrying anything for anyone else” and “did you pack your bags yourself.” I had answered “no” and “yes” respectively. I was caught out.
“Ah, it’s just a gift for a friend” I mumbled. All façade of joviality fell away.
“You don’t know what it is?”
“He said it was a camping stove.”
“How well do you know this person?”
“Ah well… y’know… I met them a few times… in Cuba… they’re Australians…” He signalled to someone, and four heavily armed customs officials appeared, taking stations between me and every exit. He withdrew a knife from somewhere and delicately cut along the seam of the package, delicately lifting up the corner of the wrapping. I contemplated what it would be like spending the rest of my life in prison. What do you get for heroin smuggling? Surely not more than 10 years with good behaviour. He lifted the flap a little further, peeking in, and then finally pulled the whole thing open. Inside was a camping stove and, inside that, a block of Cuban chocolate. The customs guy looked disappointed. The armed guards wandered off.
“I can’t let you bring this into the country, y’know” he said. “All food stuffs must be declared.”
“Can I eat it?” I asked.
“Sure.”

And so I did. A whole block of rich, dark Cuban cooking chocolate, straight down the hatch. And that’s what the Trinidad Ingenios tastes like. Although it doesn’t make me feel sick like that did.

The end of the cigar is rich and smooth. Yes, it is bitter, but it’s not unpleasant. I don’t feel any need to spit or rinse my mouth out or anything like that. In the final analysis, the Ingenios is probably not as good as the Torre Iznaga, but it is a very good smoke, and one of the better Edición Limitadas.

Trinidad Ingenios Edición Limitada 2007 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Partagás Serie C No. 3 Edición Limitada 2012

Posted on May 20, 2015 by atgroom under Edición Limitada, Partagás

Chief among the many oversights of my 2014 Partagás campaign was the omission of the 2012 Edición Limitada Serie C No. 3, a cigar that was (and remains) easily obtainable in any semi-decent cigar store. Thanks to a female friend who frequents a hair salon next to a La Casa del Habano, and thanks to her dye job taking longer than anticipated, it is an oversight that I will now rectify.

The band is ruined, courtesy of Australia’s brutal plain packaging regime. These days it is a little better: cigars are sold with a plain paper band that is cut to size and then taped over the existing band or bands. In 2012 though, it was still the early days, and the bands were covered over with a standard issue sticker. In the case of doubled banded cigars like this one, one band was removed. I tried to peel the sticker off the surviving band but ruined it in the process.

The cigar begins excellently, mid tobacco with a rich, burned espresso flavour. Behind it there might be some wood, but it’s hard to tell, so dominate is the coffee.

In Australia, and Melbourne in particular, we take smug pride in a few very dubious prepositions: firstly, that we are more serious about everything than those slackers up in Sydney; secondly, that we are more sophisticated than the Americans; and thirdly, that we have the best coffee in the world. The ultimate gratification of this collective conceit came in about 2008 when we ran Starbucks out of town. The corporation had arrived in force a few years earlier, opening stores in every major shopping strip across the city overnight. There they were, with their bright green branding, but I guess nobody went; I certainly never did – I couldn’t understand their sizes. When they shut up shop, closing all but a handful of venues at transportation hubs and tourist attractions (places where Americans tend to congregate), it was met with great fanfare. “Mission accomplished” the banners read! The media pounced on it with glee: Melbourne, the only city in the world to vanquish Starbucks.

I bring it up mainly because there is one thing in which Australia should take no pride: the iced coffee culture. Admittedly it’s mainly drunk by school children, but when you order an iced coffee in Australia you get a mess of ice-cream and whipped cream and sugar: a coffee milkshake more or less. When you order an iced coffee in America you get black coffee with ice in it. There was a period when I was in New York during their stinking wet hot summer and I lived on the things. Mostly from Starbucks. And that’s the coffee note that this PSC3 has; diluted, mass-market Arabica.

At the midpoint the cigar extinguishes itself, something it will do repeatedly for the remaining few inches. I blow the smoke out of it before I relight, and it comes back very well, with rugged, burnt chocolate. The coffee has faded somewhat but is still present on the backend. A great cigar.

It was a dreadful summer, really. I had gone to New York in pursuit of my lady love and fucked things up completely within twenty four hours of wheels down. I had booked for six weeks. A more right thinking individual would have left, would have rented a car and wandered middle America, or headed home, or to Hawaii, or Cuba, or anywhere other than there, really, but I was heartbroken and desperate and hanging on for any slight chance of a reconciliation, and so I stuck around, alone. The temperature was 30°C+ daily, humid and sweaty. My room at the YMCA (which for some reason had exposed pipes a few inches below ceiling level, perfect for a noose) was un-air-conditioned and slightly more unbearable that the street. I couldn’t deal with real restaurants (too much human interaction, and besides, I couldn’t understand the tipping etiquette), so I lived exclusively on street hotdogs, pizza slices, and Starbucks iced coffee: foods that could be ordered with little more than a grunt from either party. I would have developed scurvy if not for the ketchup on the hotdogs.

Wanting to make the most of my ‘holiday,’ I looked up a list of the fifty best tourist attractions in New York City, and gradually dragged myself to each one of them. At the Empire State I stood in line for more than an hour, in Central Park there were topless girls, but the most notable incident was the small security scare I caused at the United Nations. The ground floor of the UN has an art gallery that (after scanning your bag and your person) you can wander for free, but Guernica was on loan, and the thing you really want to see, the General Assembly chamber is off limits unless you pay $16 for a tour. I stopped by the tour desk to investigate, but the next tour was 45 minutes away, and there was a sign saying that it would be abridged as the Security Council Chamber was closed for renovations. In my weakened state I was incapable of making decisions – wait the 45 and pay the 16, or leave and go see the Brooklyn Bridge – so I was wandering the gallery aimlessly when a set of elevator doors opened nearby. A perfect, blonde, Scandinavian family, each bedecked with security lanyards, embarked and, on a whim, I followed them. A middle aged African American elevator operator beamed at us. “Welcome to the UN.” Seconds later, we were in the General Assembly Chamber, completely unsupervised. I wandered down the aisle and up to the lectern. The Scandinavian youth smirked as I mock ranted from it, raising my fist like Mussolini. Afterward, I headed down a corridor, and before long found myself in the Security Council chamber, which had a few ladders scattered about, but didn’t appear to be under any serious renovations. I sat in the Russian delegate’s chair and spun around a few times. There were some papers there, but I couldn’t read the Cyrillic script.

It was only after I was finished and standing on the mezzanine outside the General Assembly Chamber inspecting a model of Sputnik suspended over the void that someone finally approached me. “Excuse me, Sir” she said “can I see your security pass?” I shook my head. “How did you get up here?” “I just came up in the elevator.”

She shook her head. “Fucking elevator guys. It’s not your fault. They should never have let you up here.” She pulled a radio off her belt and called somebody. The word ‘intruder’ was used. With a smile that brooked no mischief I was escorted back to the elevator bank. A pair of security guards would meet me at the bottom to duck-walk me off the premises, but before that I had a moment alone in the lift with the same middle-aged African American fellow who’d welcomed me so cheerfully to the UN not an hour before. “Who let you up?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer added “Must have been the new guy. Damn new guy, no respect for procedure.”

In the final third the cigar gets a bit bitter, but a cheeky exhale expels the evil. At this point it is verging on strong, with rich earth notes, woody, and still a strong undercurrent of bitter coffee and bean notes.

Overall it’s a great cigar that sits at the high end of the EL series. For my money I’d probably take the Selección Privada today over the PSC3 at three years old, but there’s not a lot in it. It’s a long way better than the PSD4.

Partagás Serie C No. 3 Edición Limitada 2012 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Partagás Culebras La Casa del Habano Exclusivo 2007

Posted on May 6, 2015 by atgroom under La Casa del Habano Exclusivo, Partagás

The Nicaraguan cigar industry, plagued as it is by small independent producers scrabbling to distinguish themselves from each other, produces a lot of novelty cigars; a quick perusal of any US based online cigar store will reveal cigars as long as your arm, cigars with two-tone barber-pole striped wrappers, cigars shaped like onions, square cigars, and a never ending quest for thicker and thicker ring gauges and darker and darker wrappers. Cuba, on the other hand, with its virtual monopoly of the premium cigar market everywhere outside of the States, doesn’t feel the same drive, and stays more or less entirely within the same basic shapes and sizes it has been producing for five centuries. As always there is one exception: the Partagás Culebras.

Once manufactured by a few different brands, the only surviving Cuban Culebras is the Partagás one (and that has been announced as discontinued more than once, although stock seems to keep appearing). It’s an odd duck, with three heads and three feet, and a twisted mess of tobacco in-between them.

I try to open it with a cutter, but can’t manoeuvre the thing in properly, and so wind up using my fingernail. Lighting is actually easier than you would expect; the feet aren’t quite level, so a narrow, precise jet-flame and a steady hand can light each one individually without blacking the side of another. I wouldn’t recommend trying to light this one with a match. Straight away I discover that it’s impossible to toke from all three heads at once – you can’t create a seal with your lips and end up just drawing in outside air. It is easy enough to draw on each one individually, however, and I quickly fall into a rhythm of puffing from one and rotating the cigar. This would probably be a good choice for the smoker who puffs too often and causes his cigar to burn hot; the staggered inhalations keep each coal relatively un-stoked. One head has a slightly looser draw than the other two, but all fall well within the bounds of acceptability.

The cigar is very mild with light earthy notes. Deeper in there is leather and coffee. It’s a basic, nice quality light Partagás profile – not as rich as a D4 or any of the banner cigars. Maybe the start of a Lusitania.

The fire is still a good millimetre above the first ribbon when I notice it (the ribbon) beginning to melt. I untie it as quick as I can, but it leaves a thin line of melted red plastic on the cigar. As it burns off I avoid inhaling, stoking the fire by alternately exhaling through the cigar and blowing directly onto the coal. Here’s a piece of trivia for all you aspiring aficionados out there to file away: Partagás Culebra ribbons are 100% polyester.

As the cigar tightens in on itself the three coals become one, and each puff flares the entire coal. I slow my toke speed to match. I have been finding myself spending a lot of time following the paths of the cigar up, trying to figure out which end leads to which, but now that the cigar is tight and it’s all one coal, it doesn’t really matter. The flavour is still very light, mild tobacco, although the earthy tones have graduated to more of a grassy, woody note. It doesn’t offer all that much, but it is a very pleasant, no nonsense sort of cigar.

I’m about two thirds of the way through my second beer, a White Rabbit Dark Ale, when my manservant Davidé polishes off his fourth and proposes a run to the bottle-shop for some hard liquor. In a moment of weakness I toss him the keys to my cabinet upstairs and tell him to get himself a bottle of Jack Daniels. He returns ten minutes later with the most expensive scotch in the place, a Glenfiddich 125^th Anniversary Edition that I bought duty free a couple of years back, having deemed the Daniels, along with various Johnny Walkers, bourbons, and the odd Islay Single Malt, unworthy of his distinguished palette. He promptly pours himself a double.

The beer, for what it’s worth, is excellent. I don’t have a palette for the stuff, but Davidé tells me it’s extremely chocolaty, and I tend to agree. It complements the cigar very nicely.

Although I have been puffing on the triumvirate equally, the looser drawing pathway in the cigar is (fairly predictably) burning a little quicker than the other two, and as the cigar starts to tighten for a second time it begins to become a problem. I remove the main band and push the miscreant up so that the coal is level with the others. The unfortunate side effect here is that one head is now impossible to puff on. Hopefully the proximity of the others will keep it going but, if not, I suppose I can always relight. Overall the cigar is excellent, burning very cool and presenting not the slightest hint of tar, even at this late stage. The notes are lightly herbal with a faintly earthy finish. I retrohale and get a creamy note for a minute that is far above this cigar’s pay-grade.

I finish off the beer and pour myself a small dram of the Glenfiddich as Davidé helps himself to another full tumbler. The swine is shitfaced, and slumped in his chair he gurgles with wet mirth as I make snide comments about the forty dollar’s worth of whiskey he has just inhaled. It’s an odd duck, the 125^th Anniversary, with a shocking amount of peat for the Lairds of smooth Speyside. It’s not quite the tar pit of a Laphroaig or Lagavaulin, but there is a distinct iodine note in there. I’ve never been a fan of smoky whiskies with cigars as I find that they tend to bring out the worst from the leaf, exacerbating the bitterness of the tar. Fortunately, in the Partagás Culebras there’s no tar to exacerbate.

Eventually I reach the inevitable point and have to untie the final ribbon, causing the cigar fall apart. Disassembled, it resembles three petite coronas, two in the final inch and one few centimetres longer. I smoke them down to three separate nubs, puffing in rotation.

In the end this is a very easy going, no-nonsense sort of a cigar. Were it a straight parejo it would no doubt be a sleeper favourite amongst Partagás fans. As it is it is a fun, perfectly smokable cigar that deserves more than novelty status. In fact, I really feel that should be more Culebras in the world: if you’re in the business of commissioning regional edition cigars, I strongly recommend you order up a paper-wrapped Fonseca Culebras, or at least a Ramón Allones one, because I certainly enjoyed this more than a PSD4.

Partagás Culebras on the Cuban Cigar Website