Por Larranaga Petit Corona from a friend

I went through a few names before it dawned on me who sent me this cigar.  It was Scott, another inmate in the asylum.  I am not sure of the date on this cigar, by the time I post this I will know, but my guess is 2010.  It tastes new, but not BRAND new.  I have never had a post-1998 model of this cigar that I really liked.  I tell people all the time, which explains why people always try to give them to me, or tell me, "try this one", handing me some soggy-ended butt like I am gonna smoke it.  Actually I HAVE tried a few like that, but I don't like it so much.  The lore on this cigar is that it is a treasure-trove of caramel and other hard-to-find flavors often hoped for but seldom seen.  When it doesn't have it, they say that if you just give it a few years, it will come.  Well you don't have to try more than a few cabinets of 50 without finding that flavort before you know that increasingly it just ain't there.  It used to be.  I got a dress box of 25 in Windsor, Ontario one year that was among the finest cuban cigars I ever smoked.  I remember it well, some assholes had just flown a few jets into a couple of beloved icons in this country.  That made it really hard to get out of Canada with em, and more than a few sweat trails rolled down my head as I came across.  Once I arrived safely on the other side of the Detroit River, I had to pull over and look at them and do a little bear-dance inside myself as I realized fully what I had just done.   


But I traded a couple of Purple marine mushrooms to Scott and he sent me a few really nice sticks that he knew were favorites and a few of his own recent favorites / acquisitions.  His mushrooms arrived in a completely drenched out cardboard box of dead sea creatures and my stuff got here fine.  


Now when I pull out a few cigars to smoke from a cabinet, I tend to take the ugliest first.  That's what it looks like Scott did here.  This cigar looks like it was rolled by a wookie.

Oh sure, it looks good in THIS photo, but it was rumpled, outsized and torn in a few places.  I cut a tiny, shaved sliver of the cap from it and it drew and lit perfectly.  It burned with a white/grey ash and delivered a perfect draw and taste, nothing standing out, but full of typical havana tobacco taste.  It was pretty strong to me, most would call it medium strength, but this is part of the zone I like in a cuban cigar, and I typically smoke well-aged cigars that have very little of this raw flavor and power left.  It is not unruly, and I settled in to a really enjoyable smoke with a Whiskey Sour blended up in the JimmyB.  The last 4-6 cigars I have smoked for the blog have been on slightly cooling hot southern nights, complete with biting gnats and mosquitoes.  So to say I enjoyed myself is a bit of a stretch, and yet there are much worse ways to spend an evening.  The ash grows to a full inch and a half and I begin to give it a wary eye.  Not soon enough however, and it drops in my lap.  The cigar was well-prepared for it's ashing though, and it continues to burn uninterrupted.  You need to prepare for the ashing process, and I don't think many smokers do.  When you see your cigar ash getting to a point where you believe it's best to ash it, give it a little purging blow, and then follow that with a nice, long, deep draw.  Follow that up with a few small breathy puffs and then let it burn for a minute or so.  When the cigar ashes, it should break at the point where you took that deep puff, and the extra few puffs after the fact will establish the burn ring that will keep your cigar burning properly.  Try it.

The first half of the cigar was strong and flavorful and had a new flavor for me.  It had the tea taste that I love, but there was a really strong note of cane sugar which gave me a unique southern iced tea flavor that I really enjoyed.  After the ashing, the cigar was muted for about a quarter inch, but then developed a nice cuban twang that we all love as smokers of havanas.  There was a char and a bitter nut flavor and an odd piney finish.  All in all the cigar was one of the most pleasurable I have smoked in this short summer.  I really have to thank Scott for sending it to me.  Don't worry, the last time I sent him a big bag of troop support cigars I put a few nice ones in there to make up for the dead seafood I sent him last time.  It was heart-breaking to hear that the mushrooms arrived dead, they were my favorite specimen from my old salt tank.  I had never SEEN such a beautiful LSU Tiger Purple in a mushroom, and they were slow-growing and large and healthy.  I needed them to go to a good home and thought Scott was it.  But the Memphis Post Office is such an inefficient, entrenched gang of idiots that it takes a package 36 hours just to leave the city most of the time.  NOT GOOD on a flat-rate box designed to arrive in two days.  The mushrooms were well-insulated and the air was quite cool back then.  I blame their horrible mis-management and slovenly work ethic for the death of the gorgonian and mushrooms.....


Where was I?  Oh yeah, this was a GREAT CIGAR, I'd give it a solid 90 points.