Category Archives: Review

Welcome to the first day of Standard Time, if you live in an area that messes with the clocks, which is most places I guess. I despise this time of year, shorter days, dark early, getting cold. It’s always a downer for me and it’s harder for me to keep a positive attitude this year! I’m still better off than I was a year and a half ago, head-wise, and I have plenty of cigars. On a positive note, Halloween was this week, and it’a always been one of my favorite cigar nites. When my kids were little I’d take a cigar along trick or treating with them, now that I stay at home I sit on the front porch with a cigar handing out treats. I always put the cigar down when the kids come to the door, and nobody ever complains. If the neighbors haven’t seen me walking the streets with a cigar in my mouth the other 364 days of the year, I can’t help them, ya know?  Lot’s of other houses to go to if they don’t like it. Anyway, I smoked a RoMaCraft CroMagnon Cranium for the entire two hours of trick or treating, and it was outstanding. 

I felt like I needed to give the CAO Orellana a try again after giving them some rest time. The first one I smoked was unimpressive, and I felt like I should have been impressed. This is the fourth cigar in the Amazon Basin trilogy, which I guess isn’t a trilogy anymore. I wasn’t really impressed with the original Amazon Basin

, which everyone raved about,  however, the Fuma em Corda and Anaconda I thought were exceptional cigars. This Orelana, which is named after Francisco de Orelana the first European to navigate the Amazon river (is he th

e guy we have to blame for ruining brick and mortar retail? 😁) has a Brazilian Cubra wrapper. I’ve enjoyed plenty of cigars with that wrapper before, mot recently the Vicarias Red Label. The 6″ x 52 toro also has a Nicaraguan binder and Brazilain Bragança, Columbian and Dominican fillers. I found this to be a good cigar, but fairly pedestrian and routine in flavor, nothing really interesting. I suppose it hit me much like the Amazon Basin did, I just didn’t see the big deal, it’s another good cigar. I’ll tell you one thing I really didn’t like about it, and I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve been rather fortunate in my long cigar smoking career to have not burned a lot of clothes, this cigar can burn a hole in your shirt. I got down the the “band” which is cords of tobacco, and started to smell an “off” room note, then I realized that a piece of the tobacco cord had dropped on my sweatshirt and was burning a hole in it. it pisses my off a little, actually, but it could have been much worse, as it’s an easily replaceable sweatshirt. Come to think

of it, the only other time this happened was a closed foot on a CAO Flathead Sparkplug!  I’m seeing a trend here! I gotta have a talk with Ricky Rodriguez about this…So I guess the score on the Amazon series for me is a tie, 2-2, proving that not every cigar is for everyone. 

I go through this all the time, during the day I’ll think of a cigar I want to smoke, then by the time it comes around to smoking it, I’ve forgotten what it was I was thinking about smoking. This happened yesterday, I really should make a note someplace. Of course, every time after I’ve lit whatever cigar I settled on, I remember the cigar I thought of earlier and it’s too late at that point. Not that I would call it settling, but as I was rummaging around yesterday, trying to remember what cigar I had thought of earlier, I came across a Fratello Navetta Inverso Robusto and figured it would be a great cigar to smoke. I had smoked a Toscano Garibaldi last week from a pack I bough in Rome last year, I forgot about it until I saw an announcement that that line was going to be imported to the US, now they weren’t going to be special any more! It was a really good smoke, and I think I paid 8 Euros for the 5-pack or something. That really has nothing to do w

ith the Fratello except that Fratello and Navetta are Italian words and it reminded me of that. The Navetta Inverso has a Habano Nicaraguan wrapper, Ecuador binder and Dominican and Nicaragua filler, compared with the Navetta, which has an Ecuadorian Oscuro Wrapper, a Dominican Binder
and Nicaragua Filler. Like most Fratello cigars, it’s made at the Joya de Nicaragua factory (the Oro is made by La Aurora in the DR). I love the flavor of this cigar, it’s solidly medium to me, with hints of sweet tobacco here and there. It was hard to put down, literally and figuratively. Fratello Cigars recently hired Robert Hernandez as the new Regional Sales Manager based in Florida and Georgia. I received a press release about this, but news about personnel moves and inside baseball sort of stuff isn’t the kind of cigar news I like to post here as a stand-alone news piece. I just don’t feel like my readers are that interested in that, I’ll let Halfwheel, the Industry’s Blog, handle that.  Anyway, always hard to go wrong with any Fratello cigar, and even better in the Boxer size, in my opinion! I really need to get a Boxer sampler one day!  

That’s al for today, until the next time, 

CigarCraig