WRAPPER: Ecuadorian Sumatra
BINDER: Honduran Habano
FILLER: Nicaraguan, Dominican
FORMAT: Robusto (5.5x54)
ORIGIN: Honduras (HATSA)
INTENSITY: Full
NOTES:
Dark chocolate | Espresso | Smoked paprika
Boatloads of dark chocolate form much of the profile either directly or via their influence on other notes. Espresso, actually a Red Eye or Shot in the Dark (dependant upon your geographical placement) holds a calm line in the upper-middlings. Smoked paprika, cayenne, and a bit of red pepper put on a show up-top. Again, each is influenced by that chocolate, which via progression is joined by cocoa. Sharply-focused. Some table sugar on the retro-hale. This thing means rough and precision business. Also, beef jerky. At times, BEEF JERKY.
Top-to-bottom: heavily toasted barley, figs, black pepper, scorched oak, Worcestershire sauce, buckwheat honey, potting soil, and tamped-down black earth. All quite consistent. Excellent structure and complexity. Good balance. Some sharp edges here and there. Brawny sweet earthen olfactory highlighted by a thick leather that I never fully experience on the palate. Its oils would have dulled some edges, too. Still, an excellent inky smoke. I feel a bit like I need a flashlight to see my way at times. That said there is an intriguingly brighter roasted orange finish.
Built like a cylindrical cinderblock, stuffed fully and firmly-so, with silvery ash to mirror that exactly. The draw shows some resistance but we'll call it a half-hair above moderate. While the seams stay invisible, the cap does degrade a tick toward the final-third on account of that draw. Big, big smoke out-put has me wrapped in cowhide. Perhaps in a cow gut. It's a ::: very ::: meaty room now. Burn-line needs two retouches at the end of 1/3 and the beginning of 3/3. By the end, I'm inside a cow, at a steakhouse. And I'm a little dizzy. I taste dinner mint?
TASTE: A-
DRAW: A-
BURN: B+
BUILD: B+
FINAL GRADE: A-
A 90-100 B 80-89 C 70-79
::: very :::