Date Added: Friday 01 November, 2013
by Andy
£8.49
J Cortez high class Honduran orange.
Aesthetics - pretty rough looking machine made cigar, patchy brown to tan wrapper with fairly untidy cap. Pre-punched so can be smoked straight away but punch hole is very small. Feels fairly spongy, neither too dry nor too moist, a lot like a guantanamera Cristales (which being a machine-made "utility smoke", I will compare it to quite a lot) in that respect
Light and first impressions - lit ok, took a little bit of nursing to really get going but I think the fact the "veiny" element of the wrapper gives it an uneven thickness is probably at least partially responsible for this. Not producing huge amounts of smoke but it's quite a small cigar I guess.
Quite a loose draw but the small diameter of the punched hole in the cap makes it a little firmer I think, were you to actually cut this cigar, you'd probably find yourself smoking it very quickly.
There's an unusual fizzing and pooping sound that comes with the draw too which I can't explain, almost sounds like fine rain hitting a fire, doesn't add or take away from the experience but it's a thing none the less.
Flavour wise this is a very mild cigar. In the first third there's a slight citrus flavour and what I can only describe as a hint of germolene in the aroma, whether that's chemical because the cigar is machine made or what, I couldn't say. I have find memories of the smell of germolene from when I was a child (always made my grazes and cuts better!) so I actually quite like the aroma as I feel a sense of nostalgia with it, but I imagine to someone with very exacting cigar standards that this would be very off putting indeed.
I'm really struggling to find too much flavour in this cigar, there's a slight sweetness there, a bit of coffee perhaps and maybe even some chocolate along with the citrus but these flavours are so subtle and vying so much for attention that it's incredibly difficult to pick out an over riding flavour. The smoke, while mild and un-intrusive, is also a bit grey in colour rather than the thick white one associates with more expensive cigars, again whether this is due to the machine made nature or not I don't know but it's certainly not something I experience with a guantanamera.
Ok as we approach the border between first and second third, the flavour is coming out a little more, there's something of lemon meringue about it, the citrus, the sweetness and the slightly burned flavours all speak of that and there's a very slightly bitter finish when exhaling, again not to the level one finds with a more expensive cigar.
The ash is holding well though I will say that, but there's that chemically flavour again. Quite inconsistent from a flavour perspective, the flavours described are all there but they seem to come and go with varying degrees of intensity and you don't really know how much of what flavour is going to come next.
It's easy to think I'm slating this cigar but it's not actually "bad" per sè, I just think it's very "generic" as though you'd said to someone who has never smoked a cigar before to make what they think one should be like. Perhaps this is a good "beginners" cigar, I don't know. I think if it were the first cigar is ever smoked, I'd find it quite easy to get into but I'd definitely find myself wondering what all the fuss was about to an extent at the same time.
Would I buy this cigar again? In all honesty, no. I'd spend an extra £1.70 on the much bigger, better quality, Cuban Guantanamera Cristales for my "utility smoke"
