H. Upmann Coronas Major en Tubos

Picked up a handful of these, and I am going to go fairly in depth on these for a few reasons.  First off, this cigar is awfully fresh, and as such can be touchy to review without a very representative sample.  Secondly, the HU Coronas Major is a Jeckyll and Hyde act when smoked wet or dry.  Slide one out of the tube and light it up and you have a cigar as mild, bland and smokeless as a can of old skoal.  Leave one out on the table overnight to dry, and it will slap you and call you Nancy all the while smoking you out.  Our last president could have used this to smoke out the terroirists had he ever found any.   Clearly the best performance is to be had with a standard habano moisture content of 65 and below.  While still too young to review with tasting notes that are very revelatory, I can say that it is halfway between medium and full bodied, with a lot of loud, unorganized flavors and cubic yards of smoke.  To someone with better sinuses than mine, it might simply be medium bodied.  I tasted old leather, creole mustard, earth and flinty-edged woodiness.  I made that last part up.  I have no idea what that means, flinty-edged.  What I should say is that you need to check back in future entries of this blog to get better tasting notes, as the cigar is not balanced at present.  Clearly it is going to be a really great little cigar soon.

If you were to pop one out of a tube and light it right up, I am afraid you would not likely smoke this cigar again.  Surely not if it was something you had to pay for.  Moist, this cigar has nearly NO flavor to speak of, a hint of twang poking through on good draws.  That brings up another point.  The three I smoked all drew perfectly.  Tubos sometimes get a bad rap on draw, and most people do not think about drying a cigar from a tube to increase the flavor & pleasure.  Certainly no one should ever LIGHT a cigar that does not draw air.  That is just a waste.  Better to let it dry out completely, or until it WILL draw air.  But I smoked two of these dry and one wet, and there was no comparison whatsoever.  Just a fantastic dry cigar.  None of the sticks burned straight. But given that, the burn was never a runaway bad burn, canoe or tunnel.  They performed well across the board.  I liked them.  Perhaps not enough to ever go out and stock them in bulk, but nice, low-priced cigars.  Score across 3 cigars, 77.   Look for future, more detailed smokings and photos.  I ain't done with you yet.