Anything but a fad, the fat cigar trend seems destined to stay.
Everything in America is bigger. Our heavy-handed culture of size is either expressed as a badge of honor or rebuked as a gaudy sign of excess. McMansions, Big Gulps, Hummers and Mega-churches are all oversized emblems of American appetites. And now, in keeping with this American tradition, premium cigars have become thicker, fatter and larger than ever.
Over the last 10 years, many premium cigar manufacturers have stopped producing coronas, lanceros and other slim sizes formerly associated with the gentlemanly art of smoking. Outside of niche markets, they simply don’t sell like they used to. Today, the consumer’s preference for heft has forced every cigar manufacturer to make thick, fat cigars in sizes and proportions that would have been laughable a few decades ago.
Although self-styled connoisseurs will never miss an opportunity to disparage this fairly new trend, these disgruntled smokers are now nothing more than the vocal minority. They can protest all they want—the trend is only growing and it’s probably here to stay.
If you go back 20 years, a cigar with a ring gauge of 46 was considered on the larger side. This is no longer the case. By today’s standards, 46 is a small smoke. Even robustos, which tend to have ring gauges of 50, look diminutive compared with today’s giants. Many companies won’t even produce a cigar with less than a 50 ring gauge, and the reason for this is simple—consumers are focusing on ever fatter cigars.
“You can’t give panetelas away,” says Jeff Borysiewicz, owner of Corona Cigar Co. in Orlando, Florida. “Coronas and lonsdales sell, but slowly. When we look at bringing a line of cigars in, we are going to stock the top five sizes and coronas and lonsdales usually won’t make that cut.”
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