Staff Reviews

Sadistic satisfaction for the serious stogie chomper.Look, I’ll be honest. I love tobacco. I smoke pretty much constantly from when I wake up to when I go to bed, and I like to follow the great Mark Twain’s advice when it comes to cigars: “Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar”. If it’s waking hours in Pennsylvania, you can …

I don’t have a very specific taste in cigars. My mantra is ‘smoke what you like, like what you smoke’, and I have very rarely met a cigar I couldn’t enjoy. The only cigars I’ll pass up if there’s nothing else available are sticks that are too heavily sweetened, with a sugary cap. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these sticks, and I’m definitely not the kind of guy to say they’re not real …

CigarFest 2019 was a great weekend for me. I had just moved to Pennsylvania from Arizona to start at Cigars International a month or so before, and it was the perfect way to get to know a lot of my coworkers. Sure, maybe I got to know a few of them a little too well, but it was mostly a fantastic time for us, the vendors, the customers, and I suspect even some of the resort staff witnessing the …

There are a lot of torch lighters on the market. I probably have a different model torch in every drawer in my house, but yet, it seems like every day there’s a new design hitting the market. I can probably name a few dozen different models of lighters off the top of my head, but they all do exactly the same thing - light a cigar. Now I’m a guy who likes the next new thing, but I also try to stay …

A few months back, I did a quick review on all of the Oliva 2nds blends that we carried and told you my favorite. It’s one of my shortest reviews ever, but has a ton of views. Since then, the review has become a little dated (we get new sizes and versions of their 2nds all the time), but it remains one of the most useful pieces I’ve penned. Two lessons from that write-up: 1.) I write too …