WRAPPER: Ecuadorian Habano
BINDER: Dominican Olor
FILLER: Dominican, Nicaraguan
FORMAT: Figurado (6.5x52)
ORIGIN: Dominican Republic
INTENSITY: Medium/Med.-Full
NOTES:
Dessert spices | Pie crust | Suede
Picture dessert spices but no dessert. Cardamom, mace, ginger. Stuff you'd season an apple pie with. If I squint real hard and narrow I can see an apple peel. Pie crust. Okay, okay, some apple wood lends to a fairly staunch structure. This thing is a juicy red apple tease. Some tea leaf. A cracked white peppercorn nod. Way on the back-end is a caramel bit but it's enveloped in cardboard like a bakery box and still no dessert.
The under-belly is a sandy soil you'd use to pot a succulent, and there is a lot of it. Some buttery suede gets tossed in there. Nicely balanced but could use some better structure. All told, you can't knock the harmony, though. Consistent, too, minus tedium. Middlings bulge with a cereal grain addition in the opening of the second-third. So that's a transition, smoothly-so. Honey malt, particularly on the moderate finish. Yeasty.
The burn and draw start in an iffy fashion but quickly improve to excellent after the vitola's shape works past its nipply-tipply. Burn-line wobbles-some throughout but never to the point of a mandated re-touch. The draw is quite perfect to the wire. A slight-side of moderate smoke-out put yields an aroma of those desert spices and that suede but fails to accumulate into much more than a faint earthen room-note.
A pleasant maybe meditatively-so smoke with sweet hints and calmly engaging spices. It sort of doesn't give you all that you want and I sort of respect it for that.
TASTE: B+
DRAW: A-
BURN: A-
BUILD: A-
FINAL GRADE: A-
A 90-100 B 80-89 C 70-79
::: very :::