WRAPPER: Mexican San Andres
BINDER: Nicaraguan
FILLER: Nicaraguan
FORMAT: 6.25x52 box-pressed belicoso
ORIGIN: Nicaragua
INTENSITY: Medium-full
NOTES:
Chocolate | Plum | Cola
Lots of chocolate, crisply insofar as delineation and not cloyingly-sweet. From cocoa to black bread; with semi-sweet chocolate and fudge along the way. Juicy friggin' plums and prunes on the back-end. Talk of prunes and back-end seems to beg a bit of potty humor but I will be nothing but classy instead. A big note of cola rounds out the primaries and where it mingles with the plums it shows a hint of Dr. Pepper.
Middling notes are evolutions spun slowly out from the savory earthen compost core. Worcestershire sauce, patent leather, toasted cereal grains. All are exhibited harmoniously, top-to-bottom. Excellent structure highlights sharp but kind complexities. The finish falls off the table, ending a bit abruptly but quite cleanly. A retro-hale shows a finely-ground black pepper and blackstrap molasses.
The draw has a nice even tension. Burn-line wonks here and there but only requires one (1) slight re-touch. Ash is both a grower and a silver-sheathed showwer that flakes just a half-tick in the final-third. Sound all-around structure. A big but not overwhelmingly-so smoke out-put has a savory bittersweet aroma that settles into one heck of a nice extension of that room-note. Smokes like a bodybuilder cutting.
TASTE: A
DRAW: A-
BURN: B+
BUILD: A-
FINAL GRADE: A-
A 90-100 B 80-89 C 70-79
::: very :::