Los Statos Deluxe Delirios 1998 Sprummer 2012

What a beautiful Sprummer we are having in the middle of the USA.  It's Spring on the calendar and Summer on the thermometer.  Today it's not so bad, breezy and bright, with lighter pollen than the trees would indicate might be around to breathe.   It SHOULD be there, but I do not see the evidence that it is a huge problem.  Yet.  I had to rebuild a treehouse, install a window air conditioning unit and smoke a cigar.  I selected this cigar based on my recent less-than-spectacular experience with a Edmundo from 2006.

This is a machine-made cigar that most people don't care for, but to me, it always delivers great flavor, although you need to concentrate and enjoy it in the first half, because the second half is ALL machine-made blah....hot, mushy and one-noted.  It is as ugly as a cigar can be with it's reject wrapper, natural leaf, but that's about the only good thing to say about it.  That and it's Cuban after all.  And it's filler is nothing but chopped tobacco from the factory floor.  And yet somehow, the taste is similar stick to stick.   I stripped this one of it's cellophane and took it downstairs.

The first puff was excellent:  bright, sweet, herbal and thin, with a perfect draw and balance.  It offered a mouth-watering smoke that is so important for the thorough enjoyment of any cigar.  I have nothing negative to say about it.  Actually, that's not correct.  I have one negative on the cigar.  I have but 30 left and no replacements available.  There was a short time in the early part of this century where you could pick up 50 of these "spent and unwanted" smokes for about $35.  Aged, Cuban, delicious smokes for about 60-70 cents apiece.  I think I picked up about 250 of them, and as with any cigar, I gave so many away that I just lost count.  And then I began to feel a little worried that I would run out soon, so I buried the rest deeply.  I will enjoy the rest of these like Scrooge, a miser of the hard to find.  As the smoke progressed, I tasted more herbs, chocolate, a little cinnamon and some citrus notes, too.

As expected, once the cigar reached the middle point, it got hot and squeezy, and the smoke became very bland and boring.  Usually there is not much of a problem when that happens because I tend to smoke a cigar way too fast, and even the finest hand-rolled Cohiba is going to be ruined by the halfway point.  I simply have no discipline where my puff rate is concerned.  When a cigar is 50-60 cents, what's to worry about?  It is sad, however, when you realize my dollar cigar absolutely destroyed a 6 year old Montecristo from the other day.  Even at twice the age and many times lower in price,  even handicapped by it's machine-made pedigree.  So in the end, I have no problem awarding this Delirios a 82, it could be higher but for the fact that it did not go into the second half with much of anything to recommend it.