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The local tobacco shop’s humidor can be a nebulous shopping experience. “Family blend” and “reserva” are as ubiquitous in those cedar-lined rooms these days as the gold and silver foil embossing every label and box. If you can’t find your go-to brands or blends or just want to try something new, it’s usually best to look at the numbers. This isn’t a sermon on price-comparison shopping, and trying to get you more smoke for your stacks. This is about anniversario cigars—cigars blended and released to celebrate a company’s milestone.
Cigarmakers often see business through the lens of survival. Between government crackdowns on their products and a generations ago exodus from Cuba that saw many of today’s great names starting over—with a handful of seeds in unfamiliar lands—every year of making great tobacco can feel like it comes against all odds. So when they put out a new robusto or torpedo to celebrate it, the tobacco under the band is almost always some of the best they’ve got. Cigarmakers handle anniversary smokes in essentially three ways.
First, a cigarmaker may simply add a special commemorative band to their existing products, and move on with business. No, it’s not terribly exciting, but creates a fun bit of celebratory ambiance, and some of these releases can quickly gain cult-like status among collectors.
The second approach many cigarmakers take is to create a new vitola (size) for an existing blend. Padrón has done this on numerous occasions, though the Fuentes and their Opus X series would have to be the most notorious issues of new vitolas. You’ve probably enjoyed something from this collection, never to see or hear of it again.
This story is from the May - June 2024 edition of Maxim US.
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This story is from the May - June 2024 edition of Maxim US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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