FOH Discord AA Meeting?

[dhart93]

On 4/17/2026 at 7:39 AM, JDoughty said:

@NYGuido I'm not a candidate for the meeting, but I am a great advocate of pairing cigars with high end coffee and well chosen teas with complementary flavor profiles rather than alcohol, which IMO mostly just mutes the palate and gets in the way. Coffee and tea flavor notes sit beside or beneath cigar flavor notes very reliably and provide a much more complementary experience in my opinion. Would love to send over a box of some of the best NA matches I've collected for your meetings. 

I’d love to hear your recommendations on NA pairings. The only ones I have tried are NA Guinness and Root Beer.

[Ford2112]

30 minutes ago, dhart93 said:

I’d love to hear your recommendations on NA pairings. The only ones I have tried are NA Guinness and Root Beer.

I smoke cigars with coffee, foo foo drinks (sparkling water with martinellis, peach cider is my favorite), iced coffee and iced tea. And last but not least, water!

[JDoughty]

13 hours ago, dhart93 said:

I’d love to hear your recommendations on NA pairings. The only ones I have tried are NA Guinness and Root Beer.

I am a huge advocate of high end coffees and teas as cigar pairings. I prefer that or plain sparkling water to any alcohol pairing with cigars, since they keep the palate clean and refreshed without interfering with your ability to taste subtle flavor notes in the cigar. Sorry, booze pairing fans. I agree that bourbon and rum can be tasty, but IMO the delivery of those flavor notes gets in the way of a cigar more than it enhances. Coffee and tea underlie and underscore cigar flavor notes, lying beneath and beside them on the palate and supporting them rather than overpowering them at any time.

There is as much nuance to fine coffee and tea as there is to fine wine. I'm not talking about Starbucks and Lipton here either. If that's all the coffee and tea you've experienced, hold on to your hat, you are in for a wild ride when you get real with this stuff. I have no problem drinking alcohol, though I generally don't do it outside my home. I have a nice collection of very good bottles. I'm just not all that interested in reaching for them when I want to truly enjoy a cigar. When I do try a pour to pair to see how it goes, I usually quit after a few sips and pop a can of sparkling water instead to keep my palate clean. Alcohol mostly gets in the way of experiencing the full nuances and flavor profile of a cigar, even if it is tasty. 

The availability of the truly great coffees and teas does change quite a bit. What I sent @NYGuido to hopefully show and introduce to folks on your chat sessions were some of the following:

https://store.driftaway.coffee/products/colombia-franky-hoyos-tootsie-roll-competition-series This is an incredible Columbian Gesha varietal with deep, rich, fudgy notes of Tootsie Roll backed by hints of orange, tropical fruit and bubble gum. It was the best offering at the US Coffee Championships that I tasted, scoring ridiculously high with the sensory panel and for good reason. Fantastic NW pairing but won't overpower a Cuban either. Would do beautifully with a Montecristo or Bolivar for sure. I bought 10 pounds of this lot. Yes, that does mean I spent $500 on this coffee. Yes, it was totally worth it. Yes, you can vacuum seal and freeze coffee to keep it optimal for quite some time. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/DVyxsgoDuGu/ Larry's Coffee bourbon barrel cask aged. All of the woodsy, oaky bourbon barrel cask flavor, zero of the booze. Delectable as a cold brew. I usually grab 10 to 20 bags from every batch. This batch is long gone but more are coming up. 

Hugo Tea's Gao Wen. This is a fantastic cigar pairing. Reminds me of a good bourbon minus all the alcohol. Subtle and transcendant. Complex flavor notes that are rich and dark and deep, hints of tobacco and chocolate. https://www.hugotea.com/products/gao-wen

I didn't send this one, Ito En Unsweetened Jasmine Tea https://www.walmart.com/ip/12-Bottles-Ito-En-Jasmine-Green-Tea-Unsweetened-16-9-Fluid-Ounce/118689107 but it's not expensive or hard to come by, and it's a beautiful CC or NW Connecticut shade pairing. A dash of this or Hugo Tea's much better Jasmine Bai Hao https://www.hugotea.com/collections/tea-tisanes/products/jasmine-baihao over ice with sparkling water and a squeeze of something fresh - lime, lemon, a spritz of mango or passionfruit juice - or some nonalcoholic bitters, and you have a pretty banging mocktail. 

This is a tasty NA Amaro that works well in this kind of tea based mocktail, I did send some along. https://stagrestis.com/products/amaro-falso

[MrBirdman]

First off @NYGuido, congrats on nearly 15 years. I have some close family who are in long term recovery - one of them once told me that it gets easier over time, but "I'm just one day away from being passed out in my room with a vodka handle empty and a bed full of my piss." He wasn't kidding either.

For several years I attended Al-Anon meetings and they were enormously helpful. I discovered them through AA meetings while I was totally sober for about a year after a “saga” following a major operation over 10 years ago. It left me with a mandarin sized hole in my torso (I developed a skin infection and like an idiot refused to go to the hospital hoping it'd take care of itself; it didn't and I was lucky not to develop sepsis).

It took months to heal from the inside out. Since it's impossible to not move your torso anytime you move, anything but lying still was very painful. Long story short, getting detoxed off those opiates was hell and I needed some help from others. 

I think it's a great idea organizing and happy to support any way I can (might be worth putting a plug in over at the Cuban cigar subreddit if the mods don't mind).

[JDoughty]

For folks I've shared Hugo Tea with, I just got the code MOM26 in their newsletter for 15% off all the teas on their site. Only works for the next 36 hours. Their Gao Wen is a superb cigar pairing, better than bourbon with some of the same complex flavor notes in a subtle, elegant and entirely alcohol free form.