Long-time Habano lover here.

[James_Smith]

Garbandz recommended I check this forum out. I hate to do this because it seems cheap, but I'm going to copy/paste the newbie introduction I made at another cigar forum the other day...

I just wanted to tell you how came to love the leaf.

When I was a teenager, I chewed tobacco. In our small town, only Red Man and Levi Garrett were available at the local store. I preferred Levi because it was milder. Red Man always made me nauseous. I loved it, but I always paid for it later. There was never a time that it didn't make me feel sick.

I chewed for three years. The summer that I was 16, I started chewing less and less: not in terms of frequency, but in terms of the amount I packed into my cheek. Finally, towards the end of the summer, I had taken to just pulling one leaf at a time out of the pouch and chewing that. One day I said to myself, "If I'm down to chewing a leaf at a time, what's the point?" and I stopped totally. I haven't chewed since.

I smoked cigars for a brief time in the military. I served with a guy from Spain. I'm not sure how he got into the US military but there he was. He went home on leave and brought back some cigars that originated on a small island south of Florida. He came into the barracks wherein we were having a guitar-a-thon (i.e. passing around an acoustic guitar and playing and singing) and said "¡Puros, puros!" and started passing them out (he might have said "¡Habanos, habanos!" or "¡Cigarros, cigarros!" I can't remember what he said nor do I remember what word Spaniards use to refer to Cuban cigars).

I can't remember which kind they were, but I'm sure I didn't fully appreciate their complexity, never having smoked anything in my life—other than a half a pack of Winstons about 5 years earlier and some experimentation with cannabis shortly thereafter. Oh yeah: and some crack.

Ok, just joking about the crack. The rest is true, though.

I smoked for a couple of years after that, but eventually gave it up—well, it's more accurate to say that I just got bored with cigars. There's a reason for that: After the first cigar I smoked, I just grabbed whatever machine-made cigar I could get at the drug store—usually Dutch Masters or Swisher Sweets. I didn't know the difference. I didn't know enough to know that there was a difference. As you can imagine, it's kind of hard to stay interested in cigars for long when you're smoking such one dimensional sticks.

In my late twenties and early thirties, I had a boat repair business. A customer of mine lived on a yacht with his nudist wife. He was a nudist, too, but he kept his clothes on the whole time I was there. She didn't. It turns out he had retired from Altadis and, each month, he'd get a box of cigars (or maybe several boxes—I can't recall). So happy was he with the work I performed on his boat that he gave me a fistful of cigars as a tip. I smoked one on the way home. It was the first cigar I'd smoked in over 10 years. What kind were they? I can't remember, but they were much better than gas station cigars I used to buy in the military.

Later, I swung by a small liquor store that had been selling cigars but not enough to justify continuing. I bought a few Onyx sticks and he gave me a small desktop humidor and a book about cigars. That night, I read the entire thing. I read some parts several more times over the next few weeks.

The next day, a buddy of mine and I stopped by and cleaned out the rest of his (very small) inventory. Most of the stuff he virtually gave away at prices so low he was certainly losing money. He had done an economic calculation and the space he was using to store the cigars and cigar accessories was losing him money. He could keep a stack of Coors 12-packs in the same spot and make more in a week than he had made selling cigars all month, so he could have actually paid us to haul all the cigars and cigar stuff away and still ended up in the black. I walked out of there with somewhere between 100-200 cigars of varying quality: from cheap no-name brands to Aturo Fuentes.

That was about twenty years ago and I've been smoking ever since with the exception of the year 2010. I only smoked three cigars that entire year for medical reasons that I might discuss some other time.

What am I smoking now? Not much. I won't smoke inside the house and it's cold outside. It's been about freezing all day, everyday for the last couple of weeks.

I have, however, been stocking up, much to the chagrin of my wife. In the last few days, I've bought five Jaime Garcia Reserva Especiales, ten Obsidians, a sampler pack of Diesels (35 sticks), thirteen Montecristo #2s (I just got back from Europe), and a Brickhouse Corona Larga 5 pack.

I'm a recent Facebook escapee (delete your account if you have one: you'll thank me later) and there is literally no one in my life who knows much about cigars, other than my step-son who smokes with me once in awhile. You know how it is: we love cigars and we love talking about cigars and those who don't smoke them (which is almost everyone) just don't get it.

[garbandz]

Welcome..........nothing wrong with saving time.

hope you enjoy the site ,and can find your way..........

[torsion]

Welcome to FoH!!

[TheMonk]

Welcome to FOH!

[SaintMickey®]

Welcome...