La Vieja Habana Corojo

We recently completely revamped our office space, and if I must say-so myself, this required an incredibly e-fficient, pro-ficient, and su-fficient IT team to relocate the office staff to temporary cubicles. Our network admin Brian somehow kept his sanity through the project and worked around the clock to get it done. Why is this important to you? Good question. Well, one late night after all of the old stuff had been moved out, I looked out over the empty floor and saw it littered with silver - yeah coins! - quarters, nickels, dimes, pennies, even a dollar-bill. Now this stuff had been out all day with no-one claiming it. I find it hard to believe that someone would drop even a penny and not pick it up. 40 pennies makes 1 fine A-Treat carbonated beverage. 100 pennies yields at least 1 of many possible bargain bundle cigars (like Flor Del Todo). And 115 pennies gets me 1 La Vieja Habana 'Fumas' - one of my newest bargain smokes. (In total I raked in $4.61 total, 37 paper clips, 22 sticky note pads and 112 thumb-tacks). What a prize! So I promptly handed over my find back to the company coffers and picked up some La Vieja 'Fumas'. Not bad for being at the right place at the right time.

Allow me to introduce you to the La Vieja Habana 'Fumas' series, b/c if you haven't smoked them already, you're going to kick yourself for not having tried them yet. The brand was re-introduced a few years back by Drew Estate as a mixed-filler blend of Nicaraguan tobacco surrounded by a fantastic Cuban-Corojo wrapper. First, the pre-light characteristics are good, and even better if you pick up one of their fancy tubos. The wrapper is high-quality with some minor imperfections here and there, the cigar being firm yet a little rough in spots. Snip, draw and spark up - yowza - an effortless draw and billowing ash grey smoke fills the surrounding air. The first few draws offer a flavor that is subtle, calm and slightly aromatic. Outside of some softening of the cigar as you smoke it, you'll be hard pressed to identify the smoke as anything but super-premium. The mellow-to-slightly-medium flavor doesn't emphasize any specific spice, bite, or earthiness. In fact, a gentle milky-cream flavor might be the most accurate profile description, with consistency nearly up to the nubby-nub. Smoke it too close to the fingers and it'll burn a little hot, probably the only identification of a mixed-filler cigar, but I've found many long-filled premiums to do the same as well.

On a trip to the Drew Estate factory last year, we smoked these morning, noon and night. Before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner and before bed. Any cigar like this that can satisfy quickly with an unintrusive finish and will not interfere with other palate activities of the day (like some I've had that force me to endure the Listerine burn just before bed after brushing my teeth with endless ferocious-ness to get that powerful yet lingering flavor out of my mouth) is a serious winner for me. There is no such experience here, you'll love it, but don't take my word for it, give it a shot, plus it's so darn inexpensive you have nothing to lose.

Spark'em up,
Gonz