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2008 SW, last CC of the year as we left for the holidays today and all I packed were BR Petit 109s and Queen Coronas. Happy holidays to everyone.

La Punta

On the road again with a Siglo V Wishing everyone a very happy holidays 🥂

Mine- a box each of Monte Media Corona and one of Petit No. 2 at Habanos by Mehdi in Marrakech a couple weeks ago. He was super nice and patient with me while I straightened out my bank so the charge would go through. Had an espresso in the upstairs lounge after with a PSD4. Prices were expensive but what seems pretty normal lately. He had a decent selection of Monte, Partagas, Trinidad and Cohiba (maybe collecting dust), and a few others.

ART Feb 2022 El Rey del Mundo Demi Tasse...

Fonseca #1 circa 2016.

RAG 22 for the long PM session. Have a great day y’all.

JL2, courtesy of our host. OSG SEP ‘23 Divine, even in youth.

P2 And Lusi...

So I may have a new hobby. I really like these old pre Revolution/Castro boxes. This example has a remarkable Cuban Guarantee Stamp. I will post more boxes on this thread down the road as well.

Happy Friday evening everyone... Dip2 RAT ABR 21

Cumin flavored lamb at Sahbi Sahbi in Marrakech wins for me. But the merguez and beef skewers at a locals cafe near the Jemaa al Fna a close second (both ended up being too much food).

Christmas is early, Spain is still getting some (sporadic) love from HSA I guess. #estancothatneverfails. 2021 boxes too...have a great day y’all.

From last night. Went to Christmas party at local lounge. Great time all around and wanted something to last the night. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Two New Cuban Cigars Exclusively For The Asia Pacific Region Dec 20, 2024 | By Gregory Mottola Share CONTINUED

2024 Cuban Cigar top 10 as determined by members. I do like this poll as it is put together by people here who are spending there own coin. Can't quibble with what members have come up with. It will make a good sampler to kick off the new year! The D4 ran away with the number 1 pick in the end. Well deserved. Honourable mention (from me) for Punch Punch, H. Upmann Magnum 54. 1. Partagas Serie D Number 4 2. Ramon Allones Specially Select 3. Juan Lopez Seleccion Number 2 4. Montecristo Number 2 5. Bolivar Belicoso Finos 6. Partagas Serie P Number 2 7. Cohiba Robusto 8. Hoyo De Monterrey Epicure Number 2 9. Por Larranaga Petit Corona 10. Romeo y Julieta Wide Churchill

Thanks for the warning, they will dispose of these in an environmentally friendly manner and I will be more careful next time...

Esmeralda Siglo VI

Lighting up a beautiful stick today, from our excellent host. I’ve been rotating through some more recent production occasionally to check how things are going, and also trying to see what I have liked best out of the ‘23/‘24 crop of smokes. Nothing like a good foot pic, and this one’s a beauty, if you go in for that sort of thing. The wrapper is a delicious dark brown, mostly smooth with a few veins. Cold draw gives me lots of coffee and hay, with a finish of salted cocoa. On light up, I get loads of sweet tobacco, and some bittersweet orange. Going on, the first third rotates through coffee and nutty flavors, hard to discern what nut it is, but all is dominated by orange peel. Eventually, that orange peel becomes syrupy, going into Cointreau territory. The finish has the slightest bit of cocoa, and there is quite a bit of spice, strangely tasting like cumin. It’s obvious that this stick has legs for years and years, as there is some “mongrel” (which I never mind), but it is absolutely delicious right now at just over a year. Shortly after lighting, I had to note that it’s been awhile since I’ve had a JL2, that being from an ‘18 box, and it absolutely competes with BBF for my top stick. As I’m noting that, a little creamed corn sneaks its way in. Friggin’ delightful. Marzipan. Amaretto. All the almond goodness on top of the orange liqueur. And the mouthfeel…. So syrupy. I alternate between crowning the two every six months or so, but this stick has taken JL2 to the top spot, once again, over BBF. Mother of Moses!! Burn line, too, has been straight as a grizzly’s …. well you know the expression. Going into the second act, the “sharpness” of cumin has faded, and I’m left with a spice more like coriander. The second third bring more distinct notes of bright coffee, coupled with cocoa powder and baking spices. Orange is hanging out on the fringes, too, as well as almond paste. Hints of dark caramel on toast. At the midpoint I’m taking note that this cigar is simply cycling through all the flavors I’ve noted. More age will certainly bring out complexity in a horizontal way, but this stick seems content not so much to evolve, but rather show me complexity in a vertical sense. Flitting back and forth between all the aforementioned flavors, rather than taking different shapes throughout the smoke. And I am absolutely on board for it. Not so much transitional, as it is rotating. Last third starts to show its youth, but this smoke is still giving me great pops of flavor. There are lots of edges, elbows starting to show between flavor notes, but that’s to be expected. The corn flavor is becoming more prevalent, but it’s more roasted now, less creamed corn. The last little bit is dominated by delicious coffee and leather, with some cocoa on the finish and a bit of clove. Beautiful smoking experience, from start to finish. Random Friday, just finished grading papers for my Winter term students, and decided to brave the upper-40’s weather to review a fairly fresh favorite. Turned into one of the better smoking experiences I’ve had recently. The ongoing battle for my top smoke continues, with JL2 once again edging out my friend the BBF. They are like Chopin and Liszt. Pacino and De Niro. Manning and Brady. Jordan and James. Hendrix and Page. Bandit Heeler and Hank Hill. Great rivalry going on in my personal cigar world. Cheers!

Sunday lunch in the country.

Something I haven't seen before.

Hits: Cuban cigar community making lemonade out of Habanos' pricing strategy lemon and finding New World cigars that are significantly less expensive and are delivering amazing flavor and value. Fabrica 5's strong release year - four cigars have entered my regular rotation: Trinity Robusto, Ninfa, Fat Fundy and BR Petit 109. New regular production Cuban cigars - e.g. Bolívar NGM, Ramón No. 3, Hoyo Epi No. 3 - Is less ligero making them more ready to smoke young? FOH Community - an internet respite in a muddy, noisy world. Misses: Habanos S.A. for many reasons stated in other comments $75+ Cigar Trend The cigars keep getting bigger - 55rg+ is lunacy

I wasn't expecting an article from Elle Magazine in my cigar news feed this week. I guess this article appeals to the power of sentimentality. An Ode to the Smell of Cigars How a suite of new tobacco fragrances help me honor my grandfather. By Katie Berohn - Published: Dec 20, 2024 Peter Nyholm - Getty Images My grandfather loved to smoke cigars. And by that, I mean he loved to smoke cigars. For him, cigar smoking wasn’t just a celebratory puff or two at a wedding or a graduation. It was a daily ritual, marked by the silver guillotine cutter he kept in his Polo shirt pocket, the cigar butt in a constant balancing act on his lower lip. My memories of him revolve around this warm scent. One of my earliest is of sitting next to him on my parents’ back porch in Colorado, each of us in a patio chair, enjoying one of those endless, periwinkle-soaked summer nights together, with me reading a book and him puffing plumes of aromatic smoke in the direction away from me. He would wave the smoke with his cigar-free hand if the wind carried it too close to my delicate lungs. The air smelled like smoke, leather, wood, July, and yellowing book pages, and I loved every second of it. In his prime, he was a patron at a local cigar shop, where he’d go nearly every day. He’d sit in tall armchairs and shoot the breeze with the other men who, like him, were happier with a cigar in hand. When he picked me up from school in his sky-blue Oldsmobile, we’d often swing past the shop, where I was allowed in the front but never the back; unlike the outdoors, where my grandfather could wave smoke away from me, the back of the cigar shop had smoke woven into its atmosphere, hanging in the air like a velvet curtain. Courtesy Jonathan Berohn - The author and her grandfather. When I was there, the shop owner treated me like royalty—I got used to being called “the famous Katie” and offered chocolate or a lollipop whenever I strode through the door. My grandfather often cautioned me against ever smoking cigars myself, but he couldn’t help but teach me about them. He’d bring me up to the counter and let me smell the unlit cigars, telling me what notes to look for. Like fragrance, some cigars smelled leathery or nutty, some more floral, and still others, chocolatey. My most recent memory of him also revolves around smell, and it’s the one that lingers. It’s the acridly sweet smell of his hospital room, the tinge of metallic iron, and the faint aroma of microwaved cafeteria food creeping in from the hallway. Once he passed, my grandfather no longer smelled like tobacco leaves and smoke—he was gone, as was the scent that defined so much of my childhood. In the 14 years since his death, I’ve caught only whiffs of my grandfather. They come when I’m huddled in the back lawn at a wedding, or emit from a stranger’s leather jacket in a movie theatre. It wafted from the door of a cigar lounge that barred my friend and I from entry—“No Women Allowed”—a stark departure from the shop that my grandfather revered. I thought I’d lost real, unabridged access to that scent forever. As a beauty editor, I’d tried plenty of fragrances with tobacco notes, but none that ever struck a chord. That is, until I tried Le Labo’s Tabac 28, one of their City Exclusive scents (it’s usually only available in their Miami store, but occasionally, Le Labo opens this collection to other cities). Unlike most fragrances, which have tobacco in the background, this one is a tobacco-forward scent. It’s fitting for Miami, but for me, it immediately conjured my grandfather’s effortlessly cool aviators, his pocketed T-shirts, and his silver hair. Made by perfumer Frank Voelkl, the juice is unapologetic tobacco, mixed with guaiac wood, rum, cedar, and cardamom. This was the first of many tobacco perfumes that have helped me remember my grandfather, and that’s thanks in large part to perfumers reimagining how tobacco works in fragrances. Tobacco is classified as a woodsy note. “Adding tobacco into a fragrance brings a nuanced layer of smokiness to a scent,” says Linda Levy, president of the Fragrance Foundation. “It can project sweetness or come off spicy, smooth as suede and leathery.” Perfumer Ben Krigler says that tobacco has become so popular recently, thanks in large part to a spiked interest in spicier, more potent scents. “Tobacco scents are sensual, seductive, and mark the brain,” he says. “They leave a strong path. People wearing tobacco are people who want to make a statement, and they don’t want to be forgotten.” “The rich notes of tobacco have become more nuanced based on the mix of other ingredients in a specific fragrance,” Levy adds. “Recently, tobacco has been combined with sweet ingredients such as vanilla or honey, evolving from its more traditional mix of musk or even deeper ingredients, such as oud.” New tobacco fragrances are wearable and playful. They’re like a bottled version of the night my grandfather and I spent on the porch, rather than the stuffy cigar lounge that wouldn’t let me in. These fragrances combine tobacco with notes like plum and vanilla (Victoria Beckham’s 21:50 Reverie), honey (Guerlain’s Tobacco Honey), and rockrose resin (Coty Paris’s Après L’Amour). They’re a way for me to pay homage to my grandfather—without ever damaging my lungs. My personal experience offers proof of something we’ve long heard—that scents are strongly tied to memories. According to several studies, this kind of fragrance-induced memory is actually a physiological response. A 2021 study in the Progress in Neurobiology Journal showed that smell has a stronger link to memory than any other of our five senses. Another 2021 study in Nature showed that these associative memories—the ones that come up when you smell something, like how I think of my grandfather when I smell tobacco—are associated with dopamine. “That physiological reaction and personal connection to recalling a special moment when encountering a scent naturally draws us closer to it becoming part of our fragrance wardrobe,” Levy says. Like my grandfather, I too now often smell like tobacco when I enter a room. And if he were alive today, I think he’d like dissecting the notes with me like he did with pristine cigars when I was young. Maybe I’d even earn his rarest compliment: “It smells almost as good as a Cuban.” Source: https://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/a63184942/best-tobacco-fragrance-review/

Actually, the ones I am wearing are on the smaller end of my sunglasses collection. 😂

GES 23 👌

Back home for the holidays. Friend brought these last night. Pretty good. Are these the discontinued panatelas? I have no clue and that was the only possible option in CCW. Was pretty good so did not ask where / when he got them. He travels to Cuba quarterly as he has some stuff over there. Would anyone fake these things? Do they still roll them for the Island? Can I get a wheel of these anywhere?

Geez, Mike. The don got shot on Christmas Eve. 🎄

Can't sleep...

a legend, he was able to supply W. Churchill with cigars during the Blitz and come back to Dubai in such a style, he may taught Castro how to smoke a cigar.

The miss was the race to self-extinction of Habanos. They overestimated consumer/vendor loyalty at any cost. The hit was the Fabrica Piramides.

Hits: 2023/24 CC consistency. Achieving that level of QC given the struggles Cuba has had during this period...is impressive. I wouldn't have thought it was possible. CORO/D4/RASS/BRC. Well done. Oliva. I may not like many of their cigars, but I have watched Fred and team at close hand internationally. This is one company that "gets it" and is well placed for global success where the majority of others (NC companies) try to thrust US marketing on a global market that thinks differently. Habanos S.A. / Hunters and Frankau Trinidad Relaunch London. I thought it had every chance of being flop. It wasn't. Their aim was to bring in a new Trinidad consumer and as a first step they succeeded beyond what I thought possible. Lounge Lizard Cigar and Lifestyle Podcast. What a breath of fresh air to the cigar community. Misses. Habanos S.A. pricing conundrum. I estimate 50% of their portfolio is now struggling to move internationally. 2025 is going to be a clutch year. Do they plough on or pivot intelligently? I have no idea. Cigar Influencers

A little RASS to add to the collection, from our gracious host. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Oh yeah! HDMI’s Double Corona!

I suspect some of our UK members would take issue with calling London one of the “most cigar-friendly cities on Earth.”

I wouldn't be concerned until you cross the 20 year mark.

I'm seconding (thirding, fourthing ...) the advice being given to this post. One of my absolute favorite PC's to collect. Bought my first box in 2020 (TOS MAR-17) back when you could still request box codes. I later found a LEP DIC-16 and then proceeded to buy 2 - boxes for 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 box codes (besides, 50 count boxes are cool). I stopped at Cigar Armageddon because of the price increases and regret not paying the price for 2 boxes of 2022's, 2023's and now the 2024's. I'm sure someday, I'll be doing Bond Roberts to handle my "want" for these PC's at even higher prices. I do one cigar every 6 months to test their progression and keep tasting notes in my spreadsheet. As @El Presidente said above, 5 to 8 years is the sweet spot (which is consistent with what he told me in one of my posts years ago)! But interestingly, not necessarily do these get smoked in order of age or purchase. The 2016 box has made great strides but still needs some time. If I want a caramel bomb the LGR OCT-18 box that has really light, smooth wrappers is the box that I can't keep my hands off and will likely perish first. I'm lucky that I have the room to store my collection and wait for peak flavor. Once there, it's amazing how fast 100 cigars can disappear from friends, family and me - hence the two box purchase plan. You really can't best these CC's to test and then reward your patience!

Oh come on, three boxes at once!! And I still haven't seen one box in the flesh, 5 years and counting... Happy for you mate 👍

I have a TOS ‘16 cab that is smoking the lights out. I’ve tried nothing older than this.

I love fresh PLPC. I love aged PLPC I will smoke 12-25 from a fresh cab and then put them away for years. How many do I smoke from a fresh cab?…Depends. You know when you know. When I hit back to back 88's, I put them away. I have a ton of half cabs running around somewhere.

my thoughts exactly. i'll say the same next year. because we flog this deceased equine annually. yes, it is a Christmas movie. no question. no room for doubt. harry potter movies are not Christmas movies. this is. and for the record, bruce willis is wrong. die hard is a Christmas movie. the correct poll here was - 1. are you one of those who know die hard is a Christmas movie? 2. are you wrong?

For new TV series? Fallout. Close runners up: 3 Body Problem, Agatha All Along, Shogun, Masters Of The Air. There's a pile of continuing shows that are really, really great like Slow Horses, Reacher, The Boys, Silo, The Bear, Tokyo Vice, Lioness,

Caught up with old mate yesterday over a Siglo VI and then dinner at my favourite restaurant Moda. Sat at the kitchen bar and chef Javier just brought out what he liked. Standouts were tuna in passionfruit sauce, pipies in a lemon wine garlic sauce and a T-bone to die for.