…

Savor Your Time…. I write that in every Tobacconist Handbook I sign… and I mean it… as best I can…. Today I found out one of my oldest friends and business partners passed away –  Lee S. Lavinson from Holt’s and Ashton Cigars.  I hired Lee circa 1996 when he was working at a comedy club in Princeton.  He spent his time schmoozing with comedians and tipsy young ladies and I liked that about him.  I hired him to work in my Princeton store and he eventually became my General Manager for my A Little Taste of Cuba retail tobacconists.

The picture above shows him with me in Atlanta, where he came to support me when I opened my first store there.  Lee also helped me develop the first publicly taught Tobacconist University seminars in Princeton.  We would sell out a hotel convention room with consumers in the late 1990’s, provide beverages, snacks, cigars, and a six week intensive course on premium cigar education.  I could not have done it without him: in other words, TU would not be here without him.  Lee Lavinson was my right hand man in the early years of TU and we all owe him a debt of gratitude… he did it out of pure passion.  Anybody who knew Lee would say “we had a great time”: it would seem impossible to not have a good time with Lee… he always made me smile… even as I write this sad letter….

Eventually, Lee was recruited by the infamous and beloved Manny Ferrero of Ashton Cigars to go work for him.  It was an amicable split and I knew Lee was in the best hands to further his career.  Ashton and Holt’s took great care of Lee over the years and I know he was extremely grateful for all of the opportunities they gave him.  Sadly, I just saw Lee in early April at Manny’s funeral service.  We were both deeply saddened, but he still managed to make me smile and laugh.  I hugged him and told him I love him and that was the last time I saw him.  We had plans to hang out soon… but that will never materialize…. I will miss you Lee.  And judging from all of the phone calls and emails I’m seeing, there is a whole industry that will miss you too.  Thank you for being you.  I love you.

Master Tobacconist Educational Contribution

Patrick Gallagher CRT #1835

I recently began writing a monthly cigar review for a local men’s fashion magazine. Like any other reviewer, the position requires me to smoke a cigar and give my thoughts on the experience. But what is unique about the review, is that I am a certified tobacconist.

Too often, we see in today’s media the demonization of tobacco and cigar smokers. And more often than not, these anti-tobacco zealots are typically uneducated about our industry and fed a high amount of propaganda and false data. We tobacconists know the benefits and albeit the risks of tobacco thanks to our extensive training.

I am encouraging tobacconists like myself to reach out to those media channels whom embrace the luxury life style. In doing so, it is important to share your educational experience and your knowledge to those who are with us and against us. These articles and reviews are important for the longevity of our industry and our trades. We must be viewed as educators and purveyors of history and the luxury lifestyle.

Much like a sommelier is to wine, a tobacconist is to cigars/pipes. Our role is to set the stage for the consumers’/readers’ experience and to educate. Thus, preparing the consumer/reader for an emotional and spiritual moment that transcends “just smoking”. Tastes, textures, feelings: these evoke emotions which translate into a valuable experience.

Taking the role of an educator through editorial style writing is an excellent way to reach those enjoying the luxurious moments in life. I suggest finding a local magazine, blogger, or newspaper to get involved with.  Develop a piece and share it with their editor, maybe over a cigar. Explain to the editor the purpose of your piece. Much like a style columnist, we are informing those interested and involved in the lifestyle.

Remember, we are purveyors of luxury and educators of history. It is our job, not only in our stores but in the world, to uphold our traditions, values, and beliefs to honor the great cigar/pipe makers and tobacconists who came before our time.

In sixteen years of running retail tobacconists in three states I have never experienced a fire.  That winning streak came to an end in 2011 with two couch fires in one store!  Both fires started the same way, with a lit cigar ember falling between the couch cushions and starting a smoldering fire.  Both fires smoldered for a long while before people realized there was even a problem.  After about twenty minutes, smoke started emanating from the couch and the customers and tobacconist realized there was something wrong.  After squirting the smoldering couch folds with water, a fire extinguisher was necessary to completely extinguish the fire.  The second fire was serious enough that the customers dragged the couch outside of the store where the fire department had to soak it with their extinguishers.  On both occassions we were lucky to have well trained tobacconists and customers who were willing to help.  The worst case scenario was avoided… but barely.   Imagine if the smoldering fire was not noticed till after we closed and the last employee left the store… that would have been tragic!  Thank God there was no significant property damage or injury to any persons on these occassions.  But these fires should be a strong reminder to all tobacconists to have plenty of fire extinguishers on hand and tobacconists who know where they are and how to use them.    And make it a point to constantly remind your tobacconists where the extinguishers are and how to act in an emergency situation: it’s amazing how quickly people can forget what to do in a crisis!

We must stop the FDA from decimating the premium cigar industry!  They want to ban all cigar advertising, deface cigar box art with warnings and graphic imagery, and eliminate self-service humidors (ie walk-in humidors).  After years of excessive taxation and legislation, we must draw the line here!  And thanks to Cigar Rights of America and the IPCPR, we have the opportunity to do just that.  Sign this petition and share it with your customers and friends!  And DO IT NOW!!!!

Sign The Tobacconist Preservation Act too!

This is a must-see and must-share video from the New York Tobacconist Association and Ron Melendi, CMT.  It illustrates the tragic economic consequences that occur when legislators tax tobacconists and consumers at 75%.  Bare shelves, relocated tobacconists, unemployment, bankruptcy, and revenue drain to neighboring States are just some of the consequences from this draconian taxation.  Thanks to the New York Tobacconist Association for fighting for our rights and putting together this compelling video.  Our hope is that the New York legislators will see it and realize that a grave mistake has been made.

Do you ever struggle for descriptors to identify the flavors (taste + aroma) that you are sensing in your tobaccos?  Or, do you wish there was a tool to help you distinguish and organize all of those flavors so you can document the taste of your favorite cigar or pipe tobaccos?   Well, now there is – thanks to Certified Master Tobacconist David “Doc” Diaz!  After years in development, Doc has produced the Tobacco Flavor Chart to help all luxury tobacco lovers describe and analyze their favorite tobaccos.  This Tobacco Flavor Chart can be used to help you describe the cigars or pipe tobaccos you smoke as well as save that information for reference at a later date.  This is a handy tool for retailers to give to their customers and for consumers to use and save so they can remember what they smoked.  This Tobacco Flavor Chart was created as an educational tool for anyone to use and please feel free to email Doc or TU suggestions, additions, or corrections if you think they are needed.  Enjoy!  

This Tobacco Flavor Chartwas created by David “Doc” Diaz, CMT and is a Tobacconist University Certified Educational Tool.

The process of blending a premium cigar is extremely challenging.  Some cigar makers and blenders have a natural talent for it – others don’t.  One of the unique talents a good cigar blender needs is flavor (taste + aroma) memory.  Flavor memory is the ability to recall a certain flavor profile in your mind.  With good flavor memory a cigar maker can remember what a particular seco from Esteli tastes like, versus another seco from Jalapa or Condega.  Then, a cigar blender must be able to project, in their mind, what that seco will taste like beside a viso, ligero, volado, binder, or wrapper, from another farm, country, and/or varietal family.  Further confounding the recipe is the fact that there are countless nuances to priming, air-curing, fermentation, aging (añejamiento), tobacco burn rates, and even proportioning and placing the tobaccos in the finished cigar. 

The process of creating a cigar blend is daunting and there can be thousands of failures before a final blend is deemed worthy of production.   Yet, this is just the beginning.  Once a master blend recipe has been created, it must be tweaked to deliver its flavor and character in different vitolas.  Some cigar makers will further complicate the process by engineering each vitola to deliver a similar taste while others will tweak the blends to emphasize certain aspects of the components.  Lastly, a great cigar maker will be able to replicate the cigar’s flavor profile consistently, year after year.  Ultimately, cigar blending is its own art form which requires a lot of experience and talent.

While cigar blending is the process of putting tobacco leaves together to create a cigar, reverse blending is the process of deconstructing a cigar and analyzing its’ component leaves.

The TU method for reverse blending and studying a cigar’s components is called Ashtray Analysis. 

Ashtray Analysis is the process of removing the cigar’s component leaves one at a time and burning them in an ashtray.  You can smell the tobacco leaf’s characteristics while it is burning in the ashtray.

WARNING: use a bucket of water to extinguish the burning tobacco leaves and keep a fire extinguisher at the ready.

Method

Wrapper and binder leaves will separate fairly easily and it should be easy to distinguish between them. 

Burn the wrapper in the ashtray and smell the smoke.  After you have smelled enough,  put the leaf in a bucket of water and make sure nothing is left burning in the ashtray.  Repeat this step with the binder.  Once you remove  the binder, the bunch will continue to hold its cylindrical shape and you will have to finesse the filler leaves apart.  Try to separate the different leaves from each other: segregate by color and texture.  Once you have three to five filler leaves distinguished and separated, you can discard the smaller pieces of tobacco.  Don’t get discouraged if you can’t differentiate between all the filler leaves. 

Hint: the ligero will be black(ish) and should be towards the center of the cigar.  It will have the strongest and/or most pungent aroma of all the filler leaves.

What did you learn?  In the end, this exercise will give you some insight into the individual leaves that went into creating your cigar.  And, hopefully, a new appreciation for the millions of tiny steps that go into creating a great cigar.

Here is a letter written to the FDA by several members of Congress.  In it, our representatives ask and implore the FDA to exclude cigars from the regulations which are being imposed on cigarettes and smokeless tobacco. 

According to Glynn Loope, Executive Director of Cigar Rights of America (CRA), “this is the most over arching issue confronting this industry.”  We must not allow the onerous legislation and taxation to encroach on the premium cigar industry.  Please read the letter and sign up for the CRA Grassroots Email Network.  Its free and imperative that you participate to preserve our extraordinary industry.   Click on the image to read the letter!

If we fail to act now our industry will surely perish.  Join the CRA! And fight for our rights!

Thanks to Jim Luftman, CRT from Blue Havana II Cigars for bringing this article to our attention, and thanks to Steve Saka from Drew Estate for creating (perhaps accidentally) such an extraordinary piece of educational content.  Maduros are an interesting and potentially tricky topic for cigar enthusiasts.  This excellent and thorough article by Mr. Saka should help dispel some of the myths and mis-information in the marketplace. 

Hi All,

Every couple of weeks or so I do a google search on Drew Estate, Liga Privada, Acid, etc… and this thread was one of the new hits.

I am scoping it out and was cruising along fat and happy until I read
(name omitted) contention that we manipulate the wrapper color on Liga
Privada, so I decided to reply – for better or worse.

First off, on this topic – yes some manufacturers have in the past and
still do manipulate their maduro leaf to achieve a darker, more even
color, but let me share with you some info:

Maduro is a color designation but it is also a reference to specific
varieties of air cured black tobaccos which require longer fermentation
at a high bulk temp. For example, most Habano seed capas will seldom be
allowed to exceed 110 degrees in a bulk, while some CT Broadleaf will
require temps over a 125 degrees to just get it going. So while any
cigar can be maduro in color, true maduro cigars are ones wrapped with
CT Broadleaf, PA Broadleaf, San Andreas Negra, Costa Rican Morron,
Brazilian Matafina, Arapiraca, etc. So it is important that just
because a cigar may be maduro in color, it does not mean it is actually
a cigar with Maduro wrapper.

Each variety of maduro capa has it own specific traits, for example CT
Broadleaf is a very large, elephant shaped leaf with an inherent
natural sweetness and an absolute pain in the ass to work with on the
floor, while Arapiraca is long and thin, very elastic and extremely
spicy – these are the typical(s) not the not always.

When you work with maduro capas on bench, they must be incredibly wet
to handle. In fact, cigars rolled with maduro capa must be done on a
metal tabla vs. the traditional wood one you see in almost all cigar
rolling photos. The also require special wicking (drying) right after
their manufacture in order to prevent flat faces and streaking before
being place in the traditional escaparates. Another unique trait of
maduro cigars is they almost always shrink at least one ring size, i.e.
you use 52 ring mold, but after 60+ days of aging the will almost
always be 51 (and sometimes 50) in gauge. Some makers use larger molds,
i.e. a 54 to make 52s, while others like ourselves just list the
original mold size on our frontmarks.

As for modifying the color, there is a variety of ways of achieving this, naturally and artificially.

Maduro Shades

1) Naturally – by leaving the tobacco in the pilon/bulk longer and/or
allowing to ferment at higher temperatures before each turn of the bulk.

2) Naturally – by bale resting the tobacco for 6 months plus after
fermentation – this doesn’t typically change the hue as much as it
evens the color out to the darkest shade on the leave achieved in the
bulk.

3) Naturally – utilizing water in which tobacco stems have been allowed
to steep for sometimes weeks as the water added to the bulk for the
purposes of fermentation. This is a very time honored, Cuban practice
which not only results in a darker leaf, but also a spicier one.

4) Steaming – also called cooking or steeping. This is not achieved in
some giant vat like some of the posters have written, doing so would
destroy the leaf. Rather it is done in a small vessel typically 10
gallons in size to which steam is applied for approximately 60 minutes.
This technique is not only done to achieve a very dark color, it also
mellows the tobacco out making it much mellower and milder to smoke.

5) Painting – this is done by typically achieved by wiping down the
cigar gently after it has been constructed with some sort of mixture.
This can be done wither Naturally or Artificially – some are recipes
that are all natural just using the oils from the stems or picadura or
the are artificial ones that contain coloring agents. Again there is a
long history of the natural methodology, the artificial stuff really
only came into practice within the premium industry during the boom.

6) Maduro-Matic – this is a name use to describe technique #5 but done
with a machine in which the wrapper is passed through roller s. Almost
always the coloring used it artificial.

There are other techniques, but the above covers the bulk of the methods employed.

Obviously the natural techniques are a-ok, so I believe the primary
concern as a consumer is the artificial ones. The question is how can
you tell the difference?

First off it is done really well, it is very hard for someone who
doesn’t really intimately know tobaccos and how to manufacture cigars
to tell the difference.

Just having some dark stains come off the wrapper alone is -NOT- a fair
indicator, because all natural maduro wrappers will cause staining to
the skin with moisture due to their inherent oiliness. If you ever have
to opportunity to visit a cigar factory, just look at the hands of the
workers, unlike the manicure perfect hands shown in the pictures in
magazines and books, every worker’s hands are stained, even those
working with BW color shade leaf. And those rolling maduro, their hands
are sometime near black! Everyone just stages those photos, we pick out
a pretty roller(a) with nice hands, she washes up, we clean up the bench,
etc. etc. just to make a pretty picture. FWIW, it’s tough to even take
good pictures of people rolling cigars because they move too fast and
their hands are in the way, so 99% of the photos everyone see are
posed…

Also if you ever happen to be in any cigar factory, just because you
see someone wiping down a cigar with a sponge, do not assume they are
dying the wrapper. Almost all factories regularly wipe their finished
cigars gently with water (except those with blonde wrappers which are
wipe dry with a soft cloth) to remove dust and/or any debris. And that
little water bowl’s content become quite brown after just wiping a
couple of dozen sticks.

So it is not uncommon that from a really oily maduro for you to be able
to get staining while you smoke or if you were to wipe the cigar along
a sheet of paper.

However, there typically is a difference in the staining, a certain hue
and depth to it. I really cannot explain it in text, but someone with
true tobacco experience can tell.

One of the best ways for the consumer to tell if the wrapper has been artificially colored is the following:

Is the wrapper too perfect? The color is always even everywhere with no
color difference in the veins or texture, is the wrapper always extra
extra dark, does it seem to stain far more than other cigars. Now if
you think it is painted, well this is pretty easy to check – peel the
wrapper off, look at its underside, almost all capas will be a
SIGNIFICANTLY different hue on the underside. Now don’t confuse slight
difference because the oil always migrate to the exterior, so the
exterior will always be shinier – keep this in mind.

When it comes to steamed leaf the color will appear the same on both
sides, however it will always be nearly jet black and the actually
grain of the leaf will be matte. Sometimes if it is really over steamed
you will even notice a slight grayness when you reflect light across
its surface. But again, don’t confuse the grey of a cigar with plume
vs. one that is due to steaming.

I hope this provides everyone with some info to assist in making your
own judgments, but at the same time I ask that people exercise
judgment when they start claiming such and such a cigar is
artificially darkened. Please understand that this is our livelihood
and false accusations not only can be parroted, but very damaging and
unjustly so.

At Drew Estate we only employ the natural #1 and #2 techniques
described above and I take issue with anyone stating differently and
please ask for others to refer them to my comments if you ever see this
accusation again – much thanks.

Hope this helps,

Steve Saka
President, Drew Estate, Inc.
saka@drewestate.com

PM Magazine: What’s the advantage of buying cigars from a certified tobacconist?

Jorge Armenteros: As the president of Tobacconist University, I have dedicated almost 15 years to this question.  In fact, I wrote The Tobacconist Handbook (available on amazon.com) to try and improve the culture of professional tobacconists.  Above all, a certified tobacconist is schooled in fundamentals and understands the differences between tobaccos and what makes them special.  Ultimately, very few tobaccos and/or cigars are premium or luxury products.  The best cigars in the world take years or decades to create and a certified tobacconist can help a consumer enhance their own appreciation by sharing that knowledge.

…. the joy of our business is to introduce smokers to something outside of their comfort zone and watch them fall in love with it…

Excerpts from the October 2010 Issue of PM Magazine p. 48.