CigarFox

women & cigars @ casa habana

Cuban cigars are the most famous cigars among cigar enthusiasts as they are made with hand with great care given to the quality of manufacturing. While making the cigars each leaf is carefully selected, cleaned and dried meticulously and finally rolled through a very complex process. Such sort of a manufacturing process will take more time as compared with cigars made with the assistance of machines. But the smoking experience that the hand made Cuban cigars provides is beyond comparison.

As a result of the embargo placed by the United States on Cuban cigars, there has been a big gap between the demand and supply of the product in the world market. Therefore there had been a surge in the number of spurious Cuban cigar products in the market. Hence it is imperative to differentiate between genuine Cuban cigars and fake ones. For a person who have already used Cuban cigars, differentiating between the real one and the counterfeit, is not a very difficult task. The smoking experience that one would get while using genuine Cuban cigars is absolutely unique, which cannot be provided by ordinary brands or spurious products.

There are certain factors which would be of help to you, if you want to recognise the counterfeit Cuban cigars from the original one. The most important factor is the length of the cigars. Always there won’t be more than 1/16th inch difference between the published length of the cigars and the actual product. Cuban cigars will have a nice ring to it, which is tight, of good colour and contains the word “Habana.” If the word is misspelled, blemished or written in crayon, then chances are that the cigar is spurious. The foot end of Cuban cigars will be cut cleanly and if there are some discrepancies, then the cigar is not the real one.

About the Author:

Find good quality Cuban cigars at the online store of UK Tobacco.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Some Facts About Cuban Cigars

UFO Video Genuine Cigar shaped

Have you noticed the picture of Colonel Sanders at KFC? They’ve made him drop about 30 pounds.?

That and not using the word “fried”….instead it’s just KFC….is a pathetic attempt by marketers to make the frachise more attractive to health concious people. I don’t like the colonels new look. He looks like he’s lost weight from some illness. Hey….you know what else they should do? Winston Churchill….Great Britains greatest statesmen? Ok….But he was overweight! Oh dear. And he drank and smoked cigars! Oh no! Let’s have all photos of him airbrushed so he’ll look like he weighs about 120 pounds. And airbrush out the cigars. History can suffer. We’ve got our children to think about. We don’t want the little tykes being exposed to any bad examples.

KFC sucks anyway. Popeye’s doesn’t slide out of your hand get your fingers all greasy.

Thompson Cigar – Cigar Purchasing Advice With Al Remp

Cigar to smokers is just as golf clubs to golfers?Those fine, dark, leafy odors seem to permeate your every pore whenever you step into a cigar store. Although cigar is not good to health, so many people like cigar, when you smoke you are cool.(hi guys,i bought cheap golf clubs,Titleist AP2 Irons just cost $329.99,you may try.)

Do you know how long is the longest cigar in the world?

Wallace and Margarita Reyes have been rolling cigars for many, many years.  Wallace is actually a Grand Master cigar roller of which only three exist in the world.  He’s been rolling cigars since he was 12 when he was taught by his father.

In 2001 Wallace and Margarita had actually rolled a cigar that was 101 feet long and so he was already prepared for the stresses and strains of what lay ahead.  But first a brief congratulations of his aforementioned past record.

The Guinness World Record for hand-rolling the longest cigar in the world has been held by individuals or teams in only three places: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the United States.  the record Wallace and Margarita aimed to break was held by Cuban Jose Castelar Cairo who in May 2008 in Havana had rolled a cigar 148 ft 11 in long.

To roll the world’s longest cigar Wallace and Margarita had purchased around 140 lb of Ecuadorean tobacco which cost approximately $4,500.  They had pre-rolled the cigar into sections each measuring roughly 10 ft with a 64 ring gauge and this process had taken 104 hours.  The plan was on the day to roll all 18 sections together.

At the appointed hour (which for the Reyes was 4 am on Saturday November 21st 2009) they stepped into a tent which was built to act as a giant humidor and started rolling.

And on it went, minute by minute, hour after hour, the rolling of the longest cigar in the world was a total labor of love for these guys.  they actually ended up with a cigar measuring 196 feet 3 3/8 inches!!!

Congratulations to Wallace and Margarita Reyes for setting a new Guinness World Record!!!  Ybor City is back in the Guinness World Records book!

About the Author:

happy day!

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – The Longest Cigar in the World

Lady Y smoking Giant cigar, first light up

It happens to the biggest premium cigar aficionados out there: things start to get a little stale.

Not “stale” in the sense of dried-out. That can happen, of course, but it’s not likely to, if your humidor is set at the standard sixty-seven to seventy-four percent relative humidity range, and as long as the air temperature inside the box is between sixty-nine and seventy-four degrees. (It is, isn’t it?) No, this kind of stale has more to do with you than it does with the cigar. You feel like your premium cigar habit is in a bit of a rut, and you think it’s time to try something new.

Luckily, cigars come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and tastes, so if you’ve had enough of sweetish, almost-chocolaty oscuros you can move to the other end of the taste/color scale and try the pale-khaki-colored, dry, delightfully astringent tastes you’ll find there. If you’ve gotten into the habit of smoking long cigars that usually take around the same amount of time, every time, switch it up with some panatelas or cigarillos. If you’re in bad enough rut, it might even be time to make your own premium cigar sampler, going out of your way to pick cigars that don’t fit your usual taste profile.

But as above, so below: the premium cigar industry itself occasionally finds itself in the same sort of predicament. The standard shapes, sizes and tastes are already hitting their popularity plateau, and no one’s sure what the next breakthrough possibility is. At these times, makers of premium cigars often turn to one of the most reliable sources of business and cultural innovation: the past.

In the 1990s, when the premium cigar industry rebounded from a case of terminal stagnancy and even became, for the moment, somewhat trendy (while inspiring something of a late-1990s backlash as well), such a turn to the past for new ideas happened with the chocolaty, oily oscuro cigar mentioned above. These dark cigars occupy one extreme of the taste-color continuum–the informal rule by which light-colored, tan cigars are the driest and bitterest (features for which cigar aficionados prize them, as bitter hops make certain beers a once-in-a-lifetime experience), while, as cigar wrappers darken, the taste contained inside tends to get sweeter. The oscuro is like the bottom key on a piano, the lowest bass note on a guitar. It denotes how sweet and how dark a cigar can get.

But by the time of the so-called early 1990s “cigar boom,” oscuros were unpopular and very hard to find. This probably has more to do with an overall contraction in the market than with the oscuro itself, a kind of cigar that can be delightfully well-made as any other. With fewer people overall smoking cigars, flavors that had always been acquired tastes even among cigar fans were less likely to sell, and premium cigar makers stopped rolling them.
By the mid-1990s, though, you could find oscuros again–just as you can today, with the premium cigar industry continuing to function at a level far exceeding that of its 1991 state.

More recently, another nearly-extinct species of cigar has been recreated and is in the midst of repopulating cigar shops and online stores near you. The Salomon–a big cigar that comes in between perfectos and diademas in terms of its size–is tapered at both ends, and has always been popular in Cuba. Its unusual shape means that premium cigar makers have a difficult time finding rollers with the requisite talent and experience to make Salomons. But that hasn’t stopped La Flor Dominicana and Rocky Patel from adding new Salomon-sized models to their premium cigar lines–or from making quite an impression on taste-panelists and Cigar Aficionado (and other industry) reviewers alike.

About the Author:

CigarFox
provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest
cigars
that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Partagas, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1200 different cigars! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Cigar Store Trends and Tastes

Cigar Making Cuba

How do I tell the difference between real Cuban cigars and fakes?

Cohiba Cigars are my brand and I intend to visit Cuba in Oct. I want to stock up on thes beauties but don’t want to get burned and I don’t want to pay the tourist prices.

Hey Joe,

They easiest way to tell is by touch.
Real cohibas will be slightly ’spongy’ – that’s the only word i can think of to describe them.
It’s the way they are rolled that gives them that beautiful texture and taste.

And be careful where you buy them, check the humidors and the ranges they stock. These can be a massive giveaway to dodgy smokes.

Enjoy. x x x

Ann Gibson sings “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A” @ The West Coast Ragtime Festival of 2008

For many cigar smokers, the small paper band encircling their stogy is just a piece of trash, to be discarded along with the shrinkwrap around the box. But for others that cigar band is a bit of history – a collectible that adds immeasurably to the romance and mystique of smoking.

What is the cigar band, and how did it become so important? As is so often true when it comes to cigars, the story begins in Cuba – early-19th-century Cuba, to be exact, when that island nation had already come to be recognize as the cigar capital of the world. At that time cigar packaging was minimal – often no more than a wooden barrel or box, with the manufacturer’s name inscribed. The cigars themselves were generally left blank. This situation, not surprisingly, created a cheat’s paradise, in which cheap European cigars were bundled in boxes with “Cuban” markings on them and sold, domestically, to unsuspecting customers who thought they were getting fine imported Cubans.

Gustave Bock, a Dutch immigrant who owned a cigar factory in Cuba in the 1830s, is credited with being the first to place a paper band around his cigars. (Bock’s “cigar band” was just a paper ring with his signature on it.)

Many other makers adopted this practice, to the point where, by 1855, most Cuban cigar exporters were using them. These bands cut down on instances of counterfeiting while giving cigar manufacturers a way to increase name recognition and loyalty.

The practice spread from Cuba to cigar makers everywhere, and its popularity was encouraged by breakthroughs in printing technology, which developed alongside changes in the economy of Europe and the Americas that favored cigar smoking. Specifically, cheap color printing (through chromolithographic processes developed in Germany) was made widely available during the latter part of the century, and paper-embossing followed in the 1880s.

Between the expansion of the cigar industry and the new possibilities developed by the printing industry, a “Golden Age” of cigar advertising was almost guaranteed, and that’s what followed. Cigar makers began working not only to manufacture their cigars, but to differentiate their products from others. The late 19th and early 20th centuries featured elaborate, distinctive cigar box and cigar band artwork, often produced by highly-regarded commercial artists. These well-wrought bands featured images of famous figures of the day, historical figures, nationalistic imagery, nature scenes and animals. As with today’s postage stamps, special bands would be made to commemorate special events.

And, also like stamps, the bands had that combination of ephemerality and workmanship that so often draws collectors. While they were often well-made, they weren’t intended to last – so they gave collectors a challenge, as baseball cards, comic books and cheap children’s toys would later in the 20th century. And they always gave off a whiff of nostalgia, reminding dedicated smokers of good times shared with a cigar and a friend.

Children also found these bands attractive, since they were often left discarded on streets during the height of cigar-smoking’s popularity. Manufacturers even made “albums” with blank pages in which a person’s cigar band collection could be displayed – the forerunner of those plastic display sheets that every sports-card collector knows so well.

Adding to the boom in band collecting, some cigar makers gave premiums to customers who turned in a certain number of bands – everything from a set of children’s silverware (50 bands) to a Scientific American subscription (600 bands) to a baby grand piano (180,000), according to the American Cigar Co. catalog of 1904. (Those of you who used to collect Marlboro Miles during the 1990s should be feeling deja vu right about now.)

After World War I, cigars fell in popularity relative to cigarettes. Cigar makers stopped putting as much energy into the production of attractive cigar bands, as it became more necessary to cut costs. Cigar bands – at least in the US – grew generic, boring. The cost cut wasn’t enough – many thousands of cigar companies closed up shop for good in the US during the ’20s and ’30s.

Band collecting continues in the US among a hardy group mostly consisting of old-timers and nostalgia buffs, but in Europe it remains a thriving hobby, and cigar makers there continue to print colorful but cheap bands, some of which come as part of a series (again like stamps), others of which are created specifically for collectors.

About the Author:

CigarFox
provides you the opportunity to build your own sampler of the finest cigars that include cigar brands like Montecristo, Romeo & Julieta, H Upmann, Macanudo, Cohiba, Gurkha and many more. Choose from more than 1000 different brands! Other cigar products include cigar humidors, cigar boxes, and cigar accessories like Zippo Lighters.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – The History (And Value) Of Cigar Bands

Cigar Factory in Cuba

Can I purchase good cigars while in Trinidad?

I plan on being in Trinidad next week. I smoke cigars. I would like to know if I will be able to purchase/smoke some really good cigars while liming at the local rum shop.

Of course! I myself have not been to Trinidad but just ask the locals they will steer you in the right direction. Good luck and have fun!

Trinidad Habana Reserve Belicoso Cigarobsession.com cigar review

A weather-beaten Eastwood with chiseled jaws readying his gun at the first knock of door, letting in the nasty old crook to his most coveted province! After the fight that followed which did not even need a shot, Eastwood would walk in slow motion, grab a drink and bite off his cigar’s end, ready to light up, still surveying the crook for life – a classical “Western” moment and some part of it livable in real life!

Let’s face it this time – what could be a better way to wind up the delightful day than relax and set ablaze each sip of our favorite drink (single malt scotch is what I like) with a heavenly cigar! Cigars and whiskey are seriously two of the finest things in life and when working in a group, the two can invoke the most enchanting of experiences. It works for me and I see no reason why it would not for you or anyone else!

It has taken some hundreds of judges, several brain storming (rather “tongue storming”) events and tasting sessions (mostly) in Cuba and Scotland to actually cherish the experience. The partnership between the asserters of two of the finest relaxants on the planet, that is, cigars and whiskey, has avowed this delicate combination as one of the finest, that human civilization could ever conceive. My last visit to Paris for celebrating the anniversary of a world renowned lighter brand provided me with yet another reason to glorify the cause, where I had the opportunity to cherish this paradisiacal combination of Havana and Scotland – cigars and single malt. Ever since, I am easily disposed to battle whoever opposes the heavenly combination of cigars with whiskey, reasoning as wastage of taste.

Refinement on earth for me, of course, is now defined by single malt whiskey, illuminated by the glow of the best rolls. Cultivating on my recently refined tastes owing to the newly developed liking (which, in no time, turned into an obsession); I started pairing these two manifestations of refinement in various combinations conceivable. And to the utter dismay of my contesters, I would be glad to gloat that a variety of cigars complement a variety of whiskeys. However, my favorite amongst all remains no more than mild single malt lighted with a medium/full-bodied cigar (preferably, Cuban).

A lighted Cohiba Siglo IV and a glass of Highland Park Single Malt Scotch make a stunning pair and these are the names that reflexively pop out of my mouth when asked to brand my love for the delicate ecstasy. A Partagas D 4 also does go really well with a Lagavulin Single Malt. However, (high time I stopped being nepotistic) there are certain cigars that just do not go with whiskeys – scotch or not..! I do not need to name any because once one cultivates a taste for it, it is quite easy to decipher an odd pair!

About the Author:

Denis is the author and webmaster for CigarInspector.com, your source for cigar reviews and cigar ratings.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Whiskey and Cigars – the Pair Perfect!

Meliá Cohiba Hotel – Luxury hotel in Havana, Cuba

1.Hotel Nacional.

A Cuban national monument and in the fifties host to revolucionaries and the Mob,lead by Meyer Lansky.

Enter via the palm tree driveway and go to the glamorous terrace bar, and enjoy the magnificent view over the Malecon sea boulevard.

2.Cementerio Colon. (Columbus Cementery)

The Columbus Cementery is one of the most impressive places to visit in Havana. It is said to be the second largest cementry in the world after the Pére Lachaise Cementery in Paris.

3.The Capitolio.

The Capitolio was built in the same style as the US Capitol in Washington DC by the dictator Machada. Nowdays the Capitolio houses the Cuban Academy of Sciences. At the lefthand entrance is an internet café.

4.Bodegita del Medio

This restaurant and bar is famous for its Mojito cocktails and was one of Hemingway’s favourites. The tiny bar is a real tourist magnet and the cocktails are expensive compared to the other bars.

5.Casa de la Musica – Havana Centro.

The house of the music, situated on Galiano street, Central Havana, is a big club where the hottest names in Cuban salsa play. Great ambiance and hot salsa dancing all night long. Be on time , there is always a crowd. The cover charge is up to 25 CUC (30 US$) when famous bands such as the VAN VAN or CHARANGA HABANERA make their appearance.

6.Farmacia Taquechel. (the Taquechel pharmacy)

A beautiful old style pharmacy with dark wooden shelves and white porcelain jars with motifs. The pharmacy serves mainly as a a tourist attraction, their stock of medicines is very limited.

7.Real Fabrica de Tabacos Partagas.( Cigar factory Partagas)

The biggest cigar factory in Cuba, situated on Calle Industria (Industry street) near the Capitolio. An interesting guided tour of the cigar factory gives a good impression how the cigars are fabricated. At the entrance is a big cigar shop where you can buy the famous brand names : Romeo y Julia,Bolivar, Cohiba, Cohiba, Partagas.

8. El Barrio Chino ( Chinatown)

China town is situated west of the Capitolio, the entrance is marked by a big pagode style gateway. Near 1900 Havana had a Chinese community of more than 10.000 people. Nowdays the estimate is that there are less than thousand Chinese in Havana. Be sure to visit the colorful food market.

9. Museo de la Revolucion

A spectacular attracion is the Museum of the Revolution installed in the former Presidential Palace An overview of the Cuban history as well as the battles against the former dictator Batista are shown. The yacht “GRANMA” from which Fidel Castro disembarked and launched the revolution,is shown at the side entrance together with a tank used in the Bay of Pigs invasion and air missiles that shot down the US spy plane.

10. Playas del Este.( East Havana beaches)

Lovely tropical beaches starting at 15km from Central Havana, with clear blue water and palm trees. Santa Maria del Mar is the most tourist oriented place. The beaches can be reached by Viazul bus or by taxi.

About the Author:

Vic, writes content for his websites and travels frequently to Havana Cuba. He’s passionate about this exciting city. READ more stories http://www.havana-guide.com

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – First Time in Havana ? This are the Best Places to Visit

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