How did you happen to fall in love with Cuban Cigars?


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18 minutes ago, SpecialK said:

As for myself,  I was a Fuente/Villazon smoker for the most part. I'd tried numerous CCs when on cruises around the Caribean  and was never wowed by anything I had smoked. My Canadian neighbor brought me back some HDM and HU coronas along with a RASS many years back. I tried the HDM and the HU and they were alright but nothing to write home about.. One day 2 years back I had this lonely RASS staring back at me in my desktop and I thought "what the heck ? light it up"  it had at least 4-5 years on it..

This was a game changer for me : strength with sweetness , fruit cobbler, raisin, cream, it was the best cigar I'd ever up to that point.. Up to that point I thought CC's were not as good as NC's or as consistent. 

I now know that aging (which is a problem for me as I'm impatient), proper humidity, and luck with a good box code are factors that I didn't know about or even to take into account. 

I still smoke NC's but almost all now fail to measure up to a good RA / MC/ RYJ  on it's best day.. 

 

Pretty much the same, plus I don't care for the black pepper and one-dimensional flavor of many NCs. That said, there are some great NCs out there and I mix them in.

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10 hours ago, Habana Mike said:

In the early 90s. fishing off Cape Hatteras with a friend, he pulled out a Partagas. Cuban. Dark, oily, fairly small. Cello wrapped. Probably machine made.

Was the most intense and flavorful cigar I had ever smoked.

From there I became a confirmed cigar smoker. Searching for that through drug store to top end domestics (available in the US) until the late 90's.

Finally I found a group of folks that shared some sources. Stags, Gerard, some Spanish sites one could order from online.

So now able to source the ISOMs as we called them back in the day I was hooked.

 

Hatteras gives me all the feels. What a magical place, been there many many times.

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If not on queue, I think I'm smoking a Quai D'Orsay right now, but I'm not entirely sure as it feels so spongy, and has absolutely no resistance on the draw that this one is surely missing a leaf or something. Maybe it's just a Quai D' and the Orsay is still on the roller's table. I would explain the flavors, but at an inch and a half in, three full relights, and pinching the thing down to about half it's diameter I taste a little tobacco, plenty of char, but more distinctly, ten American dollars evaporating. The first from my box of ten, but if any others in the box even approach the shittiness of this one, I've got no plans to ever purchase another Quai. It might actually be the worst cigar I've ever attempted to smoke. Correction. 4th relight now. It's dumpster-bound within the next ten minutes. This thing is an embarrassment to anyone who has ever rolled a cigar. 

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29 minutes ago, SmokyFontaine said:

it feels so spongy, and has absolutely no resistance on the draw that this one is surely missing a leaf or something.

Quai box code and date, please?

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First trip to Cuba 17 years ago to fish. Fell in love with the fish, country, people, and cigars. All she wrote.

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My sister bought me a box of Esplendidos back from Cuba in the late 90s, when I was in my early 20s. Astonishingly, they were real, and delicious. From then on I was always an occasional CC smoker. I went through the occasional cigarette and then vapes, now it’s only ever a puro, probably 4-5 a week.

(Postscript: she tried the same trick again a few years later, and they were garbage.)

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