The Velvet Cigar

Posted By Elvis on November 27, 2007

Well tonight begins my two part series on some cheap ass cigars. As IronMeden has told you all, we are planning on opening our glorious cigar shop together in 2008 and I thought that from now until that time, we will let you our loyal readers in on a new phase of the painful process of opening your own shop with each blog entry. Of course I haven’t run this by Iron yet, but screw him…I’m the VP of the company…if he doesn’t like it, he can just fire me!

Right now we are in the phase of being all done with the corporate stuff, the banking stuff and the legal stuff. We have purchased a bunch of cool equipment for the shoppe and we have done a lot of networking and talking up of the place and the idea and even buying potential investors expensive dinners. Now, we wait for the final dollars to roll in and once they do, we are completely ramped up and ready to go.

So, in the meantime, with all the work done that can be done, Iron has been forging relationships with all the various cigar reps in the industry and lining up product for us once we are ready to go. He’s done a hell of a job I might add. It’s really tough picking and choosing what you will carry in a shoppe because while you want to be competitive with other shoppes in the area, you also want to carry stuff they don’t. But no matter if you have the spendiest Graycliffs or the newest Tatuaje that seems to come out every week or so, there’s one thing we’ve found you have to have no matter what…..the cheap bundle cigar.
So, I took it upon myself to order up a few samples and start getting to know these smokes that I wouldn’t normally choose for my own smoking, but that countless numbers of cigar lovers light up when they are washing the car, mowing the grass or just need a good cheap everyday smoke.

There are tons of $1.50 cigars out there via all the web stores. JR has maybe done the best at marketing their “Alternatives” and I have to say some of them are incredible. But since we don’t want to be a JR retail outlet, we’ve been looking at things like more famous brands’ “seconds” or other completely unique lines of cheap ass cigars. Our requirements for now are simply that the bundle cigar is all long filler, handnade and that it come in a normal larger gauge cigar size. We also want it to look pretty and not like some ratty thing Clint Eastwood would shove in his mouth in the desert.

Tonight’s selection was called an Original Cuban. Perfect! Might even fool some older dudes that these are actually from Cuba or from a Cuban cigar maker. I was first impressed with the fact that they offer a torpedo size….right away, it makes it seem like a legit quality cigar. The chocolate brown wrapper looks flawless in construction, but with no oils showing. The cigar was in perfect soft spongy shape, but was pretty light in the hand…probably not packed with the utmost volume of tobacco. And surprisingly these cigars are made with a wrapper I wonder if I’ve even had before…the Ecuadorian Sun Grown wrapper. They are hand made in the Dominican Republic and in our store they would run around $3.50 each if we sold them as singles….but most likely we would offer a good discount and only sell them as a bundle at maybe $55 per bundle of 20. They are on the pricier bundle side no doubt even with that generous discount. Here in Minnesota we get killed because we have to immediately add 70% “user” bullshit tax on top of wholesale price on our cigars that goes to the state coffers. Then we have to add a markup so we can pay the bills.

Anyway….I light up the Original Cuban and it’s a perfectly easy light and draw. The band-less stick is not too loose at all…but not as tight as I normally like. The flavor is very strange as a bitterness or lemony tartness hits the exact middle of the first third of my tongue. Very prominent placing of the flavor burst. Right away I thought that this is what the life of a bundle smoker has to endure. But thankfully that tartness went away within 5 or 6 puffs and the cigar really got nice and creamy with TONS of smoke billowing out of it. I like that personally since the smell was good…I like to bathe in it all around me. The official descriptions say the cigar is supposed to have almost a cream soda like sweetness, but I detected none of this. They also mention the strength will creep up on you and and take you for a spin…literally…but as I am winding down my smoke, I don’t detect that oomph….although a little pepper is building. But this is ok….I like a nice medium bodied smoke and for the price I paid, I won’t feel at all bad about lighting these up over and over again and handing some out for friends and possible customers to try. The smoke will last me about an hour or so once I’m done here and that’s a good timeline for a bundle smoke too….if I had to put it down after a half hour or something, I wouldn’t feel bad leaving 75-cents worth unsmoked. Kudos to this bundle smoke..it could make the cut…and on to the next one…stay tuned….

Elvis

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Categories: Cigar Indulgence, Dominican Republic, Sungrown
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