Saturday and Memories of the IDS (times two!)
Posted By Elvis on August 17, 2008
Once again, it has been a good weekend full of cigar smoking pleasure. Last night…or actually this morning…I got an invite to the exclusive smoking “balcony” (they need a better name) of a couple of the guys from the Havana Nights Cigar Club. I always find it interesting to see when and where guys smoke outside of the club. I have my cigar porch (I need a better name) and these younger guys have their balcony. And their balcony kicks ass. Seated on the 8th floor of a high rise apartment building on the border of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, the “balc” (that’s it!) looks smack dab east at the most perfect and pretty skyline of Minneapolis. You can see the Metrodome, the Foshay Tower and the famed tallest building, the IDS tower. It was a great night and although these young bucks make me feel old and teased me plenty about my new pair of blue Crocs (hey…smell your shoes this morning….no cigar stench on my Crocs fellas!) I know their undying enthusiasm for cigars will help ensure our cigar club keeps pushing forward long after Ironmeden and I get old and ornery and don’t want to run the damn thing anymore!
One of the owners of the “balc” was pleading with me all night to try one of his new cigars ironically also called the I.D.S. – the Isla Del Sol from Drew Estate. I was enjoying the new Arganese ML3 Torpedo and the thought of switching to a flavored or infused cigar didn’t sit well with my brain….add the fact that I was drinking Scotch and Irish Whiskey and the combo wouldn’t have been good. But I promised him I would give it my full attention this evening.
Now I couldn’t rip into this guy because just a few short years ago, Iron and I were trying everything and anything new that came out on Cigarbid and I definately had my Kahlua, Acid and Java phase. Hell, I even named the Java my Cigar of the Year in 2005! So, armed with a bottle of fresh water and the IDS, I sat down to review.
The IDS is rough looking, I won’t lie. It’s got veins all over and looks very dry. The color is a nice chocolately brown which is ironic or perhaps intended…because you can smell the chocolate mocha aroma wafting off the unlit stick from at least a half a foot away. As is my custom, I stuck the end of the cigar in my mouth before taking my guilotine to it and WHOAH! Holy sweetness! It was like sticking your tongue in a jar full of sugar mixed with Circus Peanuts and Count Crapula! This thing doesn’t just have a sweetened cap, but a quadruple blasted amount of sweet. I almost stopped there. It is seriously powerful and way overdone. After about 5 minutes, I recovered from my sugar high and put a match to this thing.
I got no flavor or aroma from the cigar until about half way through because the sugar on the cap took over all senses. But at the halfway point I did start to get some nice light tobacco taste that mixed well with the aroma of chocolate in the air. This thing is a dead ringer for a Java without the quality tobacco and construction. I was sort of enjoying the smoke at this point until I started having to spit pieces of tobacco out of my mouth and hunt them down under my tongue and in my cheeks. Dammit! It appears old Jonathan Drew has used short filler on this Super Sugar Snaps piece of crap. That was about all I could handle. I am not going to fish bits of leaf out of my mouth after every puff no matter how good a deal it is or how nice the flavors are. No wonder they run about $2 a piece. I should have known or at least suspected this fact just from studying the powdery ash, but it didn’t really start to fall apart until the tip got wetted down a bit from smoking.
So Nick, I want to thank you…it’s been a long time since I’ve tried a flavored stick, but you got ripped off my friend. I actually suggest trying to track down a five pack of Javas or some of the nearly extinct Kahlua cigars. You will get that same aroma and taste with a premium cigar build and quality to it. If you are stuck with a bunch more of these, keep handing them out to Balc visitors or keep some on hand for the ladies…they would love them!
As for the Balc, I hope for another invite soon. Enjoy your weekend everyone!
Elvis
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Elvis, despite this being a hilarious review, it may cause you “balc” invite to be revoked. Not because of your bashing a cigar that the owner loves, but because you implied that Crocs are good for anything other than holding down the shelves in the shoe store while the real shoes are sold. The fact that they don’t smell like cigar doesn’t quite make up for their looks-well, maybe if there weren’t socks underneath.
That was an amazing review-like the rest on the site. Keep it up!