Video Review - Romeo y Julieta Belicoso - BEL AGO 20

[MoeFOH]

 

[mprach024]

First 4.5 min.  Absolute perfection ??

Had to zoom out to make sure I wasn’t watching a repeat by accident. 

Great job gents!

[AusDyer]

Rob always gives Kenny a hard time about lighting his cigar properly even when he lights it perfectly. When he says that in this video, Ken's burn is nice and even. You really have to do something quite stupid on lighting to cause a cigar to taste bad, and a good cigar is generally a good cigar whatever you do. I used to buy into the whole meticulous treatment of cigars so you don't spoil them thing, but after many years I've found probably 95% of the time what's to blame for bad flavour and bad burning of cigars is the actual blend, tobacco quality and internal construction and moisture content of the cigar.

I find the whole thing about lighting a cigar for 2 hours with 10 special cedar spills and not touching the flame to the foot (some even say don't cut the cap before you've spent all day lighting it) to be absolute nonsense. I've torched cigars every which way. I've also stored cigars too dry and too humid (over-humidified probably being a much more common source of issues particularly in very young cigars). When the cigar is good it'll burn and taste good. When they're constructed and blended properly they seem to just burn nice and evenly however quickly you may torch it. Bad tasting blends cannot be blamed on how you light the cigar and let's face facts, there are far more bad and even pathetic blends and construction coming out of Havana (and other places too) than great ones.

[SpecialK]

Nice work  they are the Martin and Lewis of Cigar Reviews... always entertaining.. 

[Ken Gargett]

On 2/12/2021 at 7:46 AM, AusDyer said:

Rob always gives Kenny a hard time about lighting his cigar properly even when he lights it perfectly. When he says that in this video, Ken's burn is nice and even. You really have to do something quite stupid on lighting to cause a cigar to taste bad, and a good cigar is generally a good cigar whatever you do. I used to buy into the whole meticulous treatment of cigars so you don't spoil them thing, but after many years I've found probably 95% of the time what's to blame for bad flavour and bad burning of cigars is the actual blend, tobacco quality and internal construction and moisture content of the cigar.

I find the whole thing about lighting a cigar for 2 hours with 10 special cedar spills and not touching the flame to the foot (some even say don't cut the cap before you've spent all day lighting it) to be absolute nonsense. I've torched cigars every which way. I've also stored cigars too dry and too humid (over-humidified probably being a much more common source of issues particularly in very young cigars). When the cigar is good it'll burn and taste good. When they're constructed and blended properly they seem to just burn nice and evenly however quickly you may torch it. Bad tasting blends cannot be blamed on how you light the cigar and let's face facts, there are far more bad and even pathetic blends and construction coming out of Havana (and other places too) than great ones.

THANK YOU!!

[El Presidente]

On 2/12/2021 at 7:46 AM, AusDyer said:

 Bad tasting blends cannot be blamed on how you light the cigar and let's face facts, there are far more bad and even pathetic blends and construction coming out of Havana (and other places too) than great ones.

So when you get a great cigar out of the same box....and an ordinary cigar out of the same box a month later. 

Is that "blend", storage, luck, you, QC?

[AusDyer]

On 2/15/2021 at 7:10 AM, El Presidente said:

So when you get a great cigar out of the same box....and an ordinary cigar out of the same box a month later. 

Is that "blend", storage, luck, you, QC?

I've found that to simply be blend/leaf and construction consistency problems on the whole, unless you're doing something drastic with how you're storing them or you're tired, hungover or been eating hot spices. Being from the same box doesn't always mean much (it still can mean a much higher chance of close consistency though, but certainly not always). The cigars have come from all over the factory over the course of each day, rolled by a whole array of different rollers and from many different bales of loosely graded and manhandled tobacco leaves. I even wonder if the odd roller might occasionally pocket a nice leaf here and there for themselves, leaving the odd cigar missing a blend component.

Actually, in terms of blending, I only recently learned that a few companies like Davidoff have more grading categories for their leaves as well as their other stricter QC measures. So, as they have more leaf grades to fine tune blends, by comparison Cuban factories are randomly mixing up different blend components from higher or lower on the plant but just grouping them together as one blend component due to the tradition. Perdomo refuse to use any leaves from the very base of the stem that have wilted into the soil (causing extra bitterness) which most cigar manufacturers don't do. While I don't like Dominican Davidoffs or Perdomos much for their bland flavour, this clearly helps in QC quite a lot as their consistency (both in blend and construction) are far higher than with any Havanas. If the Cuban factories graded their leaves more finely and updated some of their processes like this, just imagine how regularly great they could be.

In terms of flavour, there is an element of how alive your taste buds are too of course. Sometimes I really want to smoke a good cigar, but I just know my taste buds are off that day for whatever reason. But mostly it's  just inconsistency in over-produced handmade products made from leaves isn't it. Padrón are always lauded (possibly alongside Davidoff) for being the best in consistency in their cigars but even with Padróns I've found quite big differences in flavour and complexity between boxes, under-filling issues and once an enormous stem down the middle of the bunch that spoiled the burn and taste.

[AusDyer]

Excuse the double post but I find this really interesting and worth being discussed far more often. This is more to do with the flavour and strength consistency than burn issues of course, but still, I felt you guys would be just as interested. Here's a time-coded link to a video at Davidoff where they're talking a little about their blending and categorization methods:

"The traditional, normal way of classification of the leaves of the plant had only 3 grades - volado, seco and ligero. What that means is that "seco" is maybe 60% of the plant. Imagine. That means maybe at least 8 leaves are considered to be the same. You know if you take leaves 5 and 6 or you take leaves 11 and 12, they're different, so when you make the blend according to that, it's going to be different."

https://youtu.be/bjOiWzekvOk?t=246