5 Vegas Miami Churchill – Cigar Review
Cigar Stats
Length: 7″
Ring Gauge: 48
Wrapper: Nicaragua (corojo)
Binder: Nicaragua
Filler: Nicaragua, Dom. Rep.
Approximate Price: $9.00
Alright, this is a fairly expensive cigar so it better be good!
Looks like a very well made cigar and it has a good amount of oils. There really isn’t anything not to like about the way this thing looks. Perfect.
Flame!
Full disclosure: Usually I drink Wild Turkey and a Cherry Coke when I smoke a cigar. Tonight, I am drinking a Ricardo’s Red Rocket Ale from Bear Republic. I went to BevMo looking to see how large their selection of whiskey is nowadays, which is paltry, and bought a six pack of Bear Republic beer. The flavors of this beer are fairly strong (supposedly it got 95 points from some group though).
Now onto the cigar!
Loads of spice and tobacco at first. Good draw. Fairly strong cigar. Hint of molasses as well. Standing up well to the beer.
This cigar is staying true an inch in. Very good cigar. It isn’t a great cigar because there is this faint but easily perceptible harshness underlying every puff.
And then things fall apart. I just smoked this cigar a couple of days ago and the experience is still pretty fresh in my mind. Either the cigar just went bad or the flavor of the beer just overpowered the cigar. My guess is that the cigar actually went bad.
I only had one beer for the whole hour+ it took me to smoke the cigar. I wasn’t getting that much of a bias from the taste of the beer.
The spice from the cigar remained strong even though the harshness took over. It does burn very evenly. And even though there is a lot of harshness the flavors that are coming through are enjoyable.
What was good about this cigar was mostly overshadowed by what was bad. In the end it was just too harsh for my liking. I vacillated between giving this cigar a score anywhere between an 83 and an 87. In the end I just couldn’t say that this was a good cigar – solely due to the harshness of it.
84 points
Rocky Patel Sun Grown Torpedo – Cigar Review
Cigar Stats
Length: 6.25″
Ring Gauge: 52
Wrapper: Ecuador
Binder: Nicaragua
Filler: Brazil, Dom. Rep., Nicaragua
Approximate Price: $7.70
Dark and oily cigar. The construction looks perfect but the appearance is another matter. There’s a couple of raised veins and it looks almost like there are creases in the cigar. Hopefully it doesn’t affect the performance of the cigar.
Thanksgiving Fire!
Yes, this is the cigar I decided to smoke on Thanksgiving. It better be good!
Absolutely effortless draw; just perfect. There’s also a good amount of spice. Full bodied cigar. The other flavors I am getting are a slight toasty flavor and there is this very subtle sweetness that I get only when I blow smoke out of my nose. Some earthiness to this cigar as well.
Burns well, actually very well. Just a couple of minor problems that does not affect my overall enjoyment of this cigar at all. Flavors are still great halfway through. Very interesting cigar.
Great flavors and it maintains its strength the whole way through. From foot to nub this is an amazing cigar that anyone who likes full bodied (it isn’t extremely full bodied) cigars has to try one of these cigars out.
92 points
Thanksgiving Cigar
Hi everybody. I know that Thanksgiving was yesterday and that I should have left you all a message wishing you a happy Turkey Day but I didn’t because I was having too much fun with my family and also enjoying a great cigar.
But first, what I am thankful for. First and foremost, my family. They are great people and deserve every last ounce of praise given to them. Secondly, God. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to have such a wonderful life. Thirdly, America. Without living in the greatest country to have ever graced Earth I would not have anywhere near as good a life as I do now.
Now onto the more jovial topics.
The food was great. We went over to my cousin’s house (they are nearly twenty years older than me) and we had some great food. Then we came home and I had a wonderful torpedo from Rocky Patel’s Sun Grown line. I gave it 92 points and you should be seeing the review sometime soon.
Anything else? No, not really. The season finale of Sons of Anarchy, my favorite new show, was on Wednesday. It’s a double-edged sword having favorite shows on cable because while they usually do touch on more risque topics it is also true that their seasons are also shorter then shows on network television.
But seeing all that I am thankful for, and it is a lot, I can easily live with only getting a dozen episodes of a good show every year. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
The Shield – End of an Era
It’s all over and, unlike with The Sopranos, it ended with a bang. I’m assuming that if you are reading this that you have seen it but if you haven’t seen it stop reading right now and watch it – then read this.
Who thought that Shane was going to kill his wife, son, and unborn daughter? Committing suicide seemed like a possibility from where I was sitting but to do the honor killings as well? That was a total shock.
How could you do that? I just don’t get it. It doesn’t fit the type of character that Shane was and that image of his wife and son laying in that bed dead will haunt me for some time.
The whole final season was like watching a train-wreck in progress. Vic giving up Ronnie to save his double-crossing wife, Dutch hunting a serial killer kid, Claudette dying while chasing her white wale, ICE fumbling their investigation into the Mexican cartel only to be saved by the duty-bound Vic, Aceveda being as dirty as possible while winning the mayoral election. It was not a perfect ending but it does seem to be a fitting ending for this series.
This show is the definition of a tragedy. Every character was fundamentally flawed and they were all working in a system that is extremely corrupt but, after all, is probably not too far-fetched a portrait of the system we live with.
Vic is a cop-killer. So was Shane. Everyone on the Strike Team was dirty because they were playing all sides against each other and trying to skim as much as they could for themselves. But did they really have a choice?
Yes, they did. But amidst all of this chaos and corruption it did seem like they were getting the job done. Well, that’s not really right though, is it? They were managing the situation as best they saw fit.
Nothing they did would have “cleaned up the streets.” And if the Strike Team were all sweetness and light they would have gotten nothing done. That is, unfortunately, the problem with fighting corruption.
In order to really fight corruption you have to work outside the system because the system is designed so that nothing good can really get done. It’s a complete shame that this is the case but it is the truth.
The one part of the final episode I didn’t like was the sanctimonious foil played by the musician turned actor will.i.am. He played the part well but I thought the character was just an indulgent throw-in by the writers. The idea that a picket line could seriously stop crack dealers, which is something he supposedly had done, is preposterous.
The solution to inner city ills is not that simple. Change doesn’t happen because you can get some people together for the occasional community gathering. That feel-good stuff works only in the minds of writers and those who aren’t responsible for affecting real change.
Sometimes you have to get men and women in there to do bad things. And that’s basically how I view the Strike Team. Some of the things they did are reprehensible but they also worked to keep drugs away from children and tried to save as many people from the destructive paths they were on as they could.
In the end it looks like Vic is decimated. He is going to have to work in a pathetic desk job for the next three years, his children are in protective custody with the intent of never letting him see them again, and Ronnie, his last team member alive, is off to jail because Vic betrayed him.
Something tells me that this isn’t the end though. There are still many unresolved story lines. And there’s Vic getting his gun out of his lock box in his ICE desk with that look of determination I am so used to after all of these years.
Will he leave his purgatory with ICE to spring Ronnie from jail? Will he ever see his kids again? And what is going to happen to Farmington? With his absence make that city fall further into the abyss?
Probably. But isn’t that the point? Even though Vic is basically a villain he is also the hero. We expect our cops to do miracles but we are outraged when they rough someone up.
In the end that is why I loved this show. There is this hopelessly lost city and it is being saved by this even more hopelessly lost individual. And without The Shield I am going to be a little lost as well. Every time one of these great shows has their series finale a hole opens up that can’t be filled by all the vapid programming that pollutes my television set.
Shows like this and the Sopranos give me a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of the world. They have left me with the realization that even if the main characters had played everything by the book it wouldn’t have changed anything. That’s a bleak outlook on life but it’s reality.
There are very bad people out there doing very bad things. I don’t know what the solution to all our ills are but picket lines and doing the same things we are doing right now will not solve any of those problems.
All I can do is what is right and at least appreciate those that are trying to do the right thing even though every last jackal in a politician’s suit will burn them at the stake the first chance they get. Oh, and I can still enjoy my cigars and whiskey… as long as they are still legal.
Sol Cubano Cuban Cabinet A – Cigar Review from In The Humidor
Cigar Stats
Length: 9
Ring Gauge: 48
Tobaccos: Ecuador (wrapper, I think), Nicaragua, and Honduras
Price: $8.00
I was scouring the web earlier today looking for interesting stuff and I came across a blog I have never seen before called In The Humidor. It’s a great blog about, you guessed it, cigars. And what really piqued my interest was the fact that his most recent review is of a Sol Cubano, which I have had the opportunity to smoke a couple of recently.
I’ve got to say that while I do agree with his review I don’t agree with the rating, I think it is too charitable. Their system over there is to rate cigars on a five-star scale. He gave the Sol Cubano Cuban Cabinet A a 3, which roughly translates to 85-90 points using the 100-point scale, or, to put it another way, it’s a good cigar in his summation.
Even though I haven’t posted my rating yet I smoked one of these A’s recently and I gave it an 81 for my score. It is just a bland cigar that I could have lived without ever having smoked it. Alright! That’s enough of me blathering on lets get to the very thoughtful review from the guy over at In The Humidor:
You may recognize this marca of cigar if you have been a In The Humidor reader for a while. I did a review on the corona size of this cigar and was very disappointed. Well I decided to give another vitola a go and decided on the rather large “A” size. This vitola had a nice wrapper with little veins present. The construction appeared to be of decent quality. I don’t usually smoke cigars of this size so it was a tad awkward at first but it felt fine after the first 3rd.
The cigar itself is a nicaraguan and honduran filler with a Ecuadorian wrapper. The medium to full bodied flavor is of earth and a bit of sweetness. The cigar is not overpowering however, in fact it falls flat compared to other medium to full sticks. I found this cigar to be rather boring by the end of the second 3rd. The flavors never produced anything that grabbed me as it started to taste like air by the last 3rd. This big boy was going to hit the ashtray without getting nubbed.
This is a boring cigar and it probably isn’t worth your time or money. This all brings me to another issue that I want to discuss at some point in the future, which is you can’t always trust your cigar retailer because, after all, they are in the business of selling cigars to you and not in the business of telling you which cigars not to buy.
Cigar Humidors
