The Drew Estate Pennsylvania Barn Smoker and One Other Cigar

Yesterday, Saturday, June 23, I had the privilege of attending the first ever Pennsylvania version of Drew Estate’s Barnsmoker Series. Last year I attended the Connecticut version and found it very educational, and, oddly, I saw many of the same people at this one. I went with a couple of friends who hadn’t been to an event like this before, one who is a cigar enthusiast, and one who is a cigar lover but not an an enthusiast so much (but is an Acid Kuba Kuba fan), but is a foodie and beer and spirits guy. I was interested to see their reaction to this event. Before I get to my perception of that, let me lay out the event from my perspective. A farm in Strasburg PA, just east of Lancaster, was the setting. Strasburg is a nice little Lancaster county borough famous for the Strasburg Railroad, a tourist fixture since I was a little kid, which we all know was a very long time ago. Another notable factoid about this area is that the movie Witness was primarily filmed not far from this area. Bonus for me was that it’s about an hour from my house. The farm was typical for the area, nothing unusual from many farms in the area, except for the huge tent and 500 cigar maniacs.

Compared to my experience at the Connecticut event, check-in lacked any lines whatsoever, it was very smooth. I’m not sure if that was the smaller crowd or what. They did advertise that parking opened at 9, and the event started “promptly” at 10. There was no traffic, no lines, very orderly and almost had me worried as we arrived around 9:40. Check-in consisted of having your ticket scanned and receiving your official Barnsmoker tupperware tub with DE stickers, a poker chip, matches, a cutter, a small vial of tobacco seeds, a cap and the voucher allowing you to buy the cigar sampler for $10. The next stop was the cigar table, staffed by Famous Smoke Shop employees, where you traded the voucher and a $10 bill for the following cigars: • Liga Privada A • Liga Privada Velvet Rat • Kentucky Fire Cured Just a Friend • Pappy Van Winkle Barrel Fermented Limitada • Larutan NDB • Experimental Pennsylvania Broadleaf blend Corona x 2 • Undercrown Sun Grown Toro • Undercrown Shade Toro • Undercrown Maduro Toro • Undercrown Shade Coronets Tin • Undercrown Maduro Coronets Tin. Obviously, paired with the $90 ticket price for the event, this isn’t a bad deal if you like cigars. Incidentally, when I got home I saw someone selling two of their Barnsmoker packages on Facebook for $100 each and had people lined up to buy them. John Drew Brands (www.johndrewbrands.com), MB Roland (www.mbroland.com), Buffalo Trace (www.buffalotrace.com), and Southern Comfort were there providing samples as well.

As with most events like this, it was nearly 11:00 before the festivities got rolling, and Fabian Ziegler was the MC and introduced Jonathan Drew who addressed the attendees. He introduced members of the Welk family, owners of the farm and growers of some of the best PA broadleaf wrapper. The group was then split in three and went to the tree stations of the educational portion of the event. The group I was in started in the curing barn. JD was the speaker here, and spoke about the process of hanging the leaf in the barn after it was taken from the field in the fall. After the leaf is dried in the rafters of the barn is where things are done differently in PA, as they hang it in a damp basement for a while while rotating it through the baling process over the winter to keep it from drying out. it’s a very manual process. From the barn we went to a station with Willie Herrera and the master brewer from Yuengling brewery where they discussed the differences and similarities between blending cigars and beer. There were samples of Yuengling beer here, but no cigar samples, so I wasn’t as interested as I could have been. Obviously with beer there’s more instant gratification than there is with cigars, however patience seems to be a common theme. This station was under a very small tent, and this happened to be the one time it rained during the day, pictures I tried to take didn’t come out due to the lighting, and I never did get a chance to talk to Willie during the event, despite my best efforts. The final station was the field, where Pedro Gomez and Don Welk went through the 7 month growing cycle from hydroponically starting the seedlings to harvesting the full grown plants, as well as the family history and and the Pennsylvania history of tobacco farming. Clearly there are differences between growing tobacco in PA versus Nicaragua, but it’s still a very manual process and there is a lot of risk. Like I saw in Connecticut, one hail storm and a whole year is lost. although in Pennsylvania there are enough tobacco growers that they do have crop insurance (I believe black tobacco is lumped in with burley tobacco for insurance purposes, someone please correct this if I’m wrong). The Time went by way too quickly on this part of the event, it was very enlightening, I’m always eager to learn more about what goes into the cigars I love.

Lunch was served and once again it was delicious barbecue, with the requisite starches to go with it. Food was plentiful, I had various meats with some slaw and mac and cheese, and I heard the ribs were excellent. I smoked one of the “PA Test Blend” cigars that were supplied because, well, I felt like I had to, and it was good, and I look forward to seeing what this will become. I’ll just say that it started off quite full and mellowed, but didn’t feel quite finished yet, like it was missing something. Maybe not balanced, I don’t know. If it ends up being half the cigar the FSG is, it’ll be great (if it’s half the price, even better! 🙂 ). I actually started the day with a very old Tabak Especiale Negra Robusto I brought with me, as I’m not a regular morning smoker, and held off on lighting up as I was taking pictures and trying to pay attention to the presentations without distractions. I really enjoyed the Tabak, as I have for many years as a morning cigar, duh, it’s tastes like coffee. Drew Estate puts on world class events, I can’t imagine they make money off of these things, especially when Operation: Cigars for Warriors ends up with $16k in donations with a large part of that being corporate matching (saying that with the utmost respect for all involved, kudos!). I think a Barnsmoker is a must do event if you love cigars, especially if you are unable to make it to a factory tour off shore, or even if you are, it’s a fun, although often too short, day. My friend Mike, a cigar guy, always enjoys events with an educational component and commented that he’d attend again. My friend Jim, the foodie, found the culture interesting, seemed happy enough with the food and drink and was interested, but seemed like more of a one and done type of attendedee, which is fine, I don’t think he was disappointed. Not everyone is the type of consumer who has to do things over and over, some people experience things once and move on to the next thing, I’m that way to some extent. Much like cigars themselves, there’s something for everyone. Thanks to everyone at Drew Estate, especially Joe, Sam, JD and Pedro for their kindness!

One other cigar that I wanted to mention this week that I smoked was the new Ramone Allones from AJ Fernandez. I went to a nearby shop on a fact-finding mission and these had just come in, so I figured I’d give the robusto a try. First observation is that these are pricey, $11 for an AJ robusto is a bit of a shock. the presentation in the 10 count lacquer box and cedar sleeve is nice, but I was taken aback. So that raised my expectation a bit. General Cigar handed trademark for this over to AJF after they gave a try at re-imagining it a few years ago under the Foundry brand along with the Bolivar. I thought the packaging on both was pretty bad, but I liked the Bolivar a lot although I thought the Ramone Allones was ~~yucky~~ not a good match to my palate. I thought the first half of this new version was pretty darned tasty, rich, dark Habano Oscuro wrapper had some nice cocoa flavor. When it got to the second half I started to get some ammonia notes, unacceptable in any cigar in my opinion, let alone one carrying a premium price tag. This was independently corroborated later in the day in a conversation with a cigar company rep who had the same opinion. My advice to retailers, for what it’s worth, is to put these away for a couple of months before putting them on the shelf for sale, probably not what people want to hear, but I didn’t find the cigar to be ready yet, there are a lot of $5.50 cigars I would rather have bought two of, quite honestly, or the Habanos “Specially Selected probably isn’t that far off of $11. It’ll be a great cigar when it’s ready. Everyone knows it’s not my way to badmouth a cigar.