ATGroom

Jasim won the Hombre Habano award in communication (popularly known as the "Habanos Man of the Year") in 2023. Kirby was nominated this year but didn't win (the winner was Annie Lorenzo, Managing Editor of L'Amateur de Cigare magazine). FWIW, none of these guys make their living influencing. Jasim runs a chain of LCDHs in the UAE. For Kirby, the videos are a loss leader for his clothing and accessories store and I think a good excuse for him to travel and have some interesting experiences. Alex Cigar Dandy does marketing and strategy consulting or something like that. Dave Dude works as flight crew. I don't know about Gizmo and his crew but I would be surprised if their podcast revenue covers much beyond the cigars they smoke. All nice guys who I would be happy to have a smoke with anytime.

As I understand it, they're not talking about throwing the bands on any old sticks they have sitting around. These bands will be for specific releases. Basically it's just a revamped Anejados program. The different coloured bands are basically the equivalent of Reserva vs Gran Reserva. They will all be in fancy packaging now, not their regular boxes like they were with Anejados.

I attended one of the Cuban Sommelier parties during the festival. Actually one of the favourite things I did there, very few foreigners and a different vibe to all the other events. https://excelenciasgourmet.com/es/noticias-gourmet/havana-club-prestigia-aniversario-20-del-balcon-del-habano A journalist asked for my impressions. There may have been some communication barrier, but it seems that I told him it was "fantastic and seductive."

Cuban cigar boxes and most limited humidors out of Cuba these days are made of Okoume (as marine ply, in the case of the boxes). It has many of the same hygroscopic properties of Spanish Cedar with no odour to speak of. Not particularly common or cheap as far as woods go, but in Australia at least it is findable and not prohibitively expensive which is more than can be said for Spanish cedar.

I've used Qbita to get money into Cuba. It isn't like the west where the exchange buys and sells. It's a literal marketplace. The person in Cuba posts an ad for the amount of BTC they want to buy or sell, and then waits for someone to contact them. When they do, they talk on the phone or meet in person and make the arrangements to handover cash, make a bank transfer etc, then transfer the crypto directly. If you can find a buyer, the transaction can be done in minutes. In my experience in generally takes about a day. There have been times it has taken a week or more. The clip is a small fee (around 1%) for Qbita. Compare that to sending it via the official channels where you are looking at 10%-15% clip to the government and 5-7 days in transit, it is better in all respects. So, it's not a scam. Like every exchange they do have wallets and you could choose to leave your bag with them, and then they could disappear one day. Pretty easy solution to that is not to leave your money with them. All that said, I haven't used it in a while and I heard that it may have disappeared as of a few months ago.

They actually have a lot of stock. Many Asia Pacific REs are still available as singles, as are various ELs etc, and they have a lot of travel humidors, jars, all kinds of things. You'll find plenty of unpopular stuff like Fonseca No.1 that has been sitting there as singles for a decade or more. The "but" is that they are all at full freight Australian prices and have plain packaging bands. I guess the hot items I would be looking at is the Sancho El Rey and the Punch Super Selection No.1 ER Thailand.

People email me at CCW every day asking for opinions on boxes. Generally I'm happy to give it in an informal way. Donations are appreciated, but not strictly speaking required. On occasion I have done a formal opinion letter on a serious box. The reports state from the outset that there is no absolute way to determine if a cigar is authentic and then go into detail on the different factors I examined and whether there were any inconsistencies found that would indicate a fake. Generally I spend about five hours writing it up, so the fee is commensurate with that. You also need to find a way to get the box in my hands, which can be costly dependant on your location. I've never actually done a report where the conclusion was that the cigars were authentic. People mainly want formal evidence of a fake so that they can claim a refund from a vendor / credit card company / insurance etc. I don't think a letter stating it was authentic for sale would be much use as any specialist cigar auction place would do their own authentication.

A very sad day for me and I’m sure many others who knew him personally. I was given a copy of the Min Ron Nee book for my 21st birthday and pawing through those pages was a big part of what kickstarted my interest in the hobby. Impossible to overstate the impact that that book had on the Cuban cigar community. Without it, I doubt there would be any CCW, and I don’t think the vintage market would exist in anything like its current form. I first met him personally in 2019. He was a true eccentric. Funny, deeply knowledgeable about many subjects far beyond cigars, generous to his friends and totally unforgiving of his enemies. Nights with MRN invariably ended at 3:30am with me bordering on passing out and him bouncing around the room keen for another cigar and another champagne and ready for three more hours. During 2021 and 2022 and the many covid lockdowns in Melbourne and Hong Kong I had a 4hr phone call with him once or twice a week as we worked through all 700 pages of El Habano Moderno together. Anybody who knew him will know why it took so long to get through it – conversation with MRN would invariably meander through many repetitions, and down side paths of stories about his life, Chinese history, photography, champagne, and many other things. It was not an efficient way to work, but I had nothing but time for him and enjoyed every minute. I have notebooks full of his musings. In between it all were flashes of true genius. EHM would not be what it is without his input. I’m honoured to call him a friend and will miss him deeply. Sharing one of my favourite photos from our time together. MRN was waxing lyrical about the strength of the bamboo cabinets he had prototyped for his unreleased second edition and invited me to test it out. For what it’s worth, it didn’t flex at all.

I have sighted some other OCT 23 MdO4 that have the small bands. Hard to say what the future will hold. Basically as I understand it the policy is and always has been that for the portfolio brands the regular production cigars get the lower quality 'old' bands that are printed in Cuba, and the special releases get the Vridjag bands which are the redesigned 'new' bands. Any redesign of a band will have the text standardised to "Habana Cuba", not plain Habana or Havana or anything else, and will also remove any reference to pre-Revolution brand owners. In practice, regular production portfolio cigars often have the redesigned bands, I can only guess because of shortages of the 'old' bands. The last few infrequent batches of MdO4 have had the new bands. So, it seems like maybe they made another batch of bands and the cigars have now returned to their correct band. In the future I'd say both bands will probably appear from time to time.

Haha, just seeing this now. Should have asked, I would have been happy to.😁 Nice to meet you and everybody else in London.

These look like Cigarte humis: https://www.cigarte.com/estuches/85-estuche-cohiba-siglos-box.html Cigarte are a licensed manufacture of branded accessories for Habanos. Most of the other humis in this thread are theirs also. They are all sold empty. Sometimes distributors will pick up a batch and repackage into them and sell them to their stores as a value add. More often it's the stores doing it themselves.

If any US based members are going this year (even just to Cuba in the next few weeks), please DM me. Looking for some mules to carry books over. And yes, I'll be there.🤪

Yeah, Habanos says Gordito though. I'll see what it says on the flyer when they are released. If it says Gordito then I guess it would be a case of "officially Gordito but made with dropped heads as a factory error." The closest example I can think of is the Romeo 130th Humidor which had 109s with normal heads.

I'm considering it. I guess the argument against it is as far as I know this is still considered to be state secrets within Cuba and I don't want to rub anybody the wrong way. If anything I think I'd do a checker tool where you put in your box code and it spits back the factory.

Thanks guys, glad you enjoyed it. Always a pleasure to have a chat with an interesting character like Habano News. I did a Q&A session at a club in Kuwait a few nights ago that got into some interesting stuff far beyond the usual "how did you start smoking, what's your favourite cigar" etc. I didn't realise it was being recorded so was probably a bit more candid about a few things than I should have been. I understand that it will turn up at some point, and might be of interest. As for a regular series, nice idea, but unlikely I'm afraid unless somebody else organises it. I find all my various ticks too unwatchable to edit the videos.🤪