2008 H. Upmann Magnum 46 Tubo

One of the all-time popular habanos of the modern era, the Magnum 46 is possibly the biggest love/hate cigar in the catalogue.  Many people swear by it as one of the best, just as many think it's overrated, has a weird taste and they just don't like them.  This cigar was fantastic.  It slipped out of the tube a bit moist.  When I pinched a divot fromt he head, it was extremely soft and spongy.  Not the cigar, just the cap.  I thought that might be a problem.  I usually try to dry a cigar like this out, but I was ready to smoke, and it just could not be helped.  It fired up a bit slow as expected, but I was greeted by a rush of twangy delicious tobacco taste, with a side note of tea.  At times during the smoke, it would go completely off of the flavor train and go all creamy.  Just spectacular complexity and taste.  Even burn, but extremely slow.  My inattention led to a few relights, but these did not affect the flavor in a negative way.  It gave up a ton of smoke and flavor.  This tends to make me believe that I have been a little late to the Upmann party.  I just finished one of the best cigars I have had in 2010, a 2010 Upmann Corona Major.  Chalk up another one, this Magnum 46 tallies a 90 without even trying.

Me want BBQ!

I have been sick for a week, guy comes to work hacking and snortiung and slobbering and gets a few people sick and they share of course.  So it's been no cigars for a bit.  But what I am even more upset about missing is my smoked meat.  I used to be humble about it, but apparently I have a skill set here.  Ralph misses it....

I taste test the smoked ribs and he just looks at me like I have NO class whatsoever.  "When goin be MY time?"  Indeed.  He eats first EVERY weekend, why he looks at me like that is beyond me.   I make sure it is cool first, the whole deal.  And THIS look.  I will take one this evening with a little more drool.  Now, if I can only get some cigars smoked....

Machine-Made to Handmade conversion in Habanos' catalogue

When Habanos stated it's intent to cease all production of machine-made cigars in which hand-made versions were also available, it came as a surprise.  But not an altogether bad idea if you consider their logic in making the decision.  First of all I have no idea what HSA does behind closed doors.  I can only take what little they say, and couple it with what I have seen them do in the market subsequent to those statments.  And it looks like they are comfortable with their position.  For a consumer of habanos, it came to a head during some righteous sales where a buyer could get machine-made habanos for 33 to 99 cents a stick it seemed, and then the slow rising of the price of the boxes in the hands of "smo-llectors" who bought to have something to cut the grass with and now had cigars that people wanted but could no longer get.  While it never reached the frenzy for discontinued cigars like the Ramon Allones 898 Varnished or Rafael Gonzalez Lonsdales, the machine-mades witnessed an upswing in purchases as nostalgia proved a major factor with buyers.  I know a collector with 40 boxes of Partagas Perfectos.  I wish it was me.  The cigar's demise is not likely to bring too many tears, they were spongy, inconsistent in flavor and wouldn't hold an ash.  But they were fun and cheap to smoke and now they are gone.  Save some against the push of progress if you've got a box.  Smoke em and enjoy em if you have a dozen boxes.  If you have a rush of nostalgia, find La Troya and Belinda machine-made tubos availale at better retailers.

But wait a minute, what's the second half of the two good things we got the day the cellophonic music died?  All or plenty of these cigars were, at least for now by default, switched to handmade production sticks.  This has been ongoing since near the start of the discontinuation of Machine-mades by 2003.  And after now having had two standouts among the new HAND-made versions, I am pleased that they are being offered.  I spoke about it earlier, but the Super Partagas and Por Larranaga Montecarlos and these H. Upmann Coronas Major tubos are just great little cigars, now totally handmade.  In fact, the Por Larranaga Montecarlos have overtaken the shooting star Petit Coronas that seemed to have wasted immortality.  Great cigars of near cult legend one day, and then just so-so today.  I have personally quit buying or smoking them.  But the Montecarlos spill over with creamy, toasted toffee tastes and a little caramel and pepper and spice.  Everything the old Petit Coronas used to be.  Habanos said that they were going to use the best tobaccos for the hand-made favorites and stop smearing the name of handmade cigars in a marque with the performance and the impression of machine-made cigars using the same name.  I think in a lot of cases, the hand-made versions were no longer widely available.  Now that the machine-made cigars are mostly out of manufacture, these hand-mades have almost been making market re-introductions.  And boy, some of these cigars are emerging stars...Or so it would seem to me, looking on from space.  TO ME, some of the best things being done now by HSA.  That's why REs and ELs to me are not as satisfying.  These now-all handmade versions of old cheap cigars are where the taste is now.  How that changes with time is certainly still up in the air.

Aging Small minutos and perlas

A reader asked about aging Montecristo No.5s.  I can only state what I would do.  Provided you had access to them, I would buy two or three boxes at a time and put them away and smoke new cigars of one or two years age while other boxes aged.  I would take the cigars out of their original packaging and place the cigars in either the varnished cedar plywood box of modern Cuban cabinets, or the solid cedar plank boxes many NC cigars come in today.  I'd keep unboxed cigars in amounts of 25-50 cigars on hand for grabbing.  Old cedar or mahogany really makes a nice home, especially mahogany as it is less aromatic and likely to become a dominant flavor in stored cigars like cedar does.  Just as pipe tobacco in a mason jar ferments and gets sweeter and offers an more intensely fragrant experience to the nose as time goes by, so will your Little Montes.  There are nice boxes around at your tobacconist, or you may already have several nice ones.  Real age will be happening in the boxes you hopefully fail to remember having buried somewhere.  If you want to artificially age them a little faster so you can smoke them quicker, just let the little dress boxes do their work and oxidize your smokes.  A cigar in that type of packaging peaks a lot earlier than something packed in cabinets.  You should get a variety of interesting tastes as they age, seemingly monthly, if you smoke them fast enough to notice.  It's such a consistent performer at any age, but all of the research I have done while in space points to 4 years as a basic spot where your cigars are performing at their peak and the burn and taste are very well balanced.  Age after that is beneficial, especially if the cigars are properly stored with as little direct contact to oxygen as possible.  I mean theoretically.  Chasing cigar performance over time is a rabbit hole...everything is fluid and crop dependent.  The way they used to make em is different every year, haha.   I find that the cocoa and cedar flavors as well as mouth coating is enhanced as the Montecristo No.5 ages into the limited perpetuity of my limited experience.  Tea flavors build in and add to the pleasure.  Buying more than you can consume per year by even one box in 12 months can really result in some great cigars in 5 years and super-sweet cigars in 10-20 cigars.  It's just the level of one's self-control that allows them to age.  You can either do it or you can't.  But the reward is certainly there.  If you wanted a lot of fantastic Montecristo No.5s or Shorts or Bolivar Coronas Junior, you can unbox and place into cedar as many as you can today, because no matter HOW long you age the smokes before smoking them, you have to START saving them before any of it can happen.  But specifically I feel like they peak at 7 years and age very gracefully from there.  In the dress box they can offer variable success.  The boxes don't seal all that well sometimes.  Two year old cigars would begin to develop a creaminess to go with their pepper and spice and leather.  This begins the balance process.  It comes into stride, I find, at 4 years.  And it's definitely worth it.

Too good to pass up.

I keep running into perfect times to smoke some 2010 H. Upmann Coronas Major that I came across that I was sure were going to be project cigars, just too young to waste, and they performed variably right out of the tube, and strong when dried.  I was sitting down at the Flying Saucer waiting for a friend to join me for a beer, and I look up and see in chalk, "If you HEART cigars, HEART em outside."  At a location nearby, there is a smoking section for cigars, and I appreciate that.  I don't appreciate the policy at this location, however, as dusk begins to fall.   A long bank of scattered clouds covers the last of my warm face-sun as I smoke this cigar outside like the bums insist.  WOW.  What a fantastic cigar  Plenty of strength and super-charged coffee elements and sweet hay.  As it burned a bit more, NONE of the flavors went away, they just piled on like the Bremen-town Musicians.  Cocoa and vanilla, chocolate, herbs, toasted bread and meat.  Really a well blended smoke.  Perfect burn even in the wind.  Yes there was wind, and temps were heading down overnight into the mid and high 30s.  But right then it was hanging in around 58.  This actual cigar was an easy 93 and really pulled up the average for the whole survey of four I have had over the past 30 days or so.

To me this is a cigar with huge potential.  I would try to find some and get a few boxes before the bosses find out how good these handmade marevas are.  This is one of those mysterious cigars that were inconsistent as  machine-mades;  they were just as good as bits of mixed filler can allow you to be, but no more.  TODAY, these handmade cigars, along with the Super Partagas are just wholly re-invented as good representatives of the delights of one marca or another.  You taste a Super Partasgas today and you get a cigar that approaches the vaunted Charlotte for pencil-sized stunners.  Less power, but hinting at it.  I'm sure there are more than a few formerly machine-made cigars that are perfect strangers to people everywhere in their hand-rolled form, now the only form available.  I wish they would start a Partagas Perfecto handmade version of the old machine-made superhero.  That'd sell.

1998 H. Upmann Monarch

Smoked a pretty gutsy cigar today, a 1998 Monarch that was not interested in how my day was, it was strong and a bit unbalanced.  That said, there were not a lot of distinct flavors for me outside of tobacco.  An occasional hint of cocoa was all of the exotic flavor I would get.  I also got some hints of froot loop dust in my nose a few times.  Now kids, I do not condone snorting pure sugar and food coloring, but as a veteran cereal eater, I've had a bit of the magic dust that makes that Toucan go a bit off kilter.  I got hints of that in the beginning.  But enough spoilers.

The cigar was a medium tan wrapper with a bit of a dark oiliness.    It was a hard, box pressed stick with little indication from wrapper or construction that anythng might go wrong.  It lit up nicely and took flame evenly.  It was basically a flawless performance throughout the first 1/4 of the smoke.  It burned uneven for a
 time but not crooked. 

The flavor was quite wheaty with herbal tones that played a surprisingly complex palate, but my taste buds were reeling from a recent bout of pipe smoking.  To top that off I had sinuses that were a bit irritated to boot.  The flavor was constant and  uncomplicated, but I missed a lot of nuance.  Some of that could be the cigar.  Most of it was me.  It burned cool and slow for it's entire length, the only fault I could find with it was it tended to put wisps of smoke in the air near my eyes that I could have lived without.  It also had a habit I did not care for much and that is the development of a slow burn, which most people like, but made me impatient.

I liked this cigar.  It was different in texture and patois than many havanas and burned with excellent construction evident at every turn.  It didn't try to do too much, and held up well for it's 12 years in the game.  I'd have liked a bit more flavor, but I smoked it in less than perfect circumstances given the fact I wanted to have an entry for today and I had to smoke a cigar to do that.    I also smoked up some ribs this morning and wanted somethng to work well after that meal.

Clearly burnt to a crisp.  But these were those 'ehhh' ribs from the proud rib region of Denmark.  I wanted to cook but did not feel like breaking out my good meat.  A little chewy, but good for anchoring the slather of BBQ sauce, anyway.  But I should have bought baby backs instead which I would have served dry with sauce on the side.  According to my brother-in-law, I cook cash money ribs, and that's a fair compliment since he gets em free. 
But not today.  Well......they'll eat.

As for the monarch, I think this is a good example of Havana getting some things right during a tough time in their history.  In general the churchills from right after this period are well constructed but seemingly with less interesting materia prima.  They are fine, but kind of foggy on the palate.  But without a doubt, they retain some power after 10 years in the worst HSA packaging for aging cigars over a longer term.  So this cigar is worth smoking if only for that.  But it had hidden finesse and a balanced body and mouth-feel.  80 for that quality, but short on interesting and unique flavor bursts that make or break a cigar this age, so when overall flavor comes into consideraton, the cigar fails to rise above 82.  A good performing cigar that just fell short.