Hawk | CigarCraig's Blog

When I was at the TPE show and visited with Susana at Danli Honduras Tobacco (DAHOT), she gave me samples of two of their new offerings, the Divinus and the Born To Be Wild. I finally got around to smoking them this week. Unfortunately, I have no blend details on either cigar yet, when I get them I’ll edit them in, but until such a time I’ll fake my way through. I’ll start with the Divinus. This is a perfecto shaped cigar, 6″ long, like all of DAHOTs cigars, and maybe hitting 54 ging in the middle. I probably should have taken a measurement. I’m going to guess that the wrapper was some sort of Connecticut varietal grown in Honduras under shade, or a darker Ecuador Connecticut. It had that look and flavor. It was a nice smoke, medium bodied, quite well behaved for a large perfecto, but I rarely have issues with Danli Honduras Tobacco products. This cigar has “Tabacalera San Jeronimo” on the band, which answers a question I’ve had for a long time about the factory making this brands cigars. This is a factory which was associated with Kafie cigars, with which he’s no longer associated. I’ve never had any of Kafie’s cigars. He once blocked me on social media because I called him out for having his kids at a cigar rally. He justified it, but I pointed out, like I did in a recent rant, that it doesn’t matter what rational justification he might have, people against tobacco will use it against us. Remember, when it comes to the government and tobacco, rational thought goes out the window, tobacco is bad, nothing else matters. Anyway, This Divinus was a good cigar, maybe the first cigar from them that I didn’t really fall in love with.

I did, however, really like the Born To Be Wild cigar from DAHOT. I wish I had taken pictures of the box for this, it looks like a motorcycle piston. You can kind of see it in the video I did at the TPE show (HERE) where Susana talks about the cigar a little. Again, I don’t have blend info, but it’s a dark maduro, maybe San Andrés, maybe another Honduran varietal fermented to a maduro. It had a dark, meaty flavor, very savory, as opposed to sweet. It was really interesting and unusual, and I liked it very much. I’d love to have to make room for a box of these in my humidor! The company has several maduros in the portfolio, the Don Juan Calavera, the Marchetti, the Flor Maya, Caterina, even the Clown has a Maduro barber pole, all oare on the sweet side, but this one is so different. I desire more. I admit that I prefer more traditional branding, but the cigar is really good.

I walked in to Son’s Friday evening and encountered John Ciabocchi, our area’s A.J. Fernandez rep, who stopped in to do an impromptu Cut and Light event. This threw off what I had planned on smoking for the evening, but I’m adaptable, so I started off with a Dias de Gloria in the box pressed toro vitola. This is a Nicaraguan puro made with tobaccos from four of the company’s Esteli farms. I don’t believe I had smoked this cigar before, a mistake I don’t intend to repeat. This is a damned good smoke. The marketing on this says something about this representing the pre-castro days of cuban tobacco. Maybe? I don’t have a frame of reference, and I have a hard time with Abdel Fernandez, who might be 40?, having any notion what that tasted like then. It’s nice to dream about, but hardly verifiable. Can we agree that it’s a great tasting cigar? If you like a cigar with a good balance of rich tobacco and some sugarcane sweetness, give this a shot. It was a nice way to spend two hours, and it’s always nice seeing John again.

Last cigar: The Hawk from Blackbird Cigars. I hadn’t smoked this one before and figured I’d give it a try, even though I’m not a big fan of hawks. We’ve lost a couple of really nice chickens to hawks, right in front of our eyes, and it wasn’t pretty. We do our best to keep them out of our yard. They are neat and all, just not around our place! Hawk isn’t a regular production Blackbird line, but a special release with Adrian Acosta’s Cigar Culture. This cigar was a Gran Toro, 6″ x 56, box pressed, with a Brazilian Cubra wrapper, a San Andrés binder and Dominican and Nicaraguan fillers. This cigar falls into the woody/nutty spectrum for me, with some hints of sweetness and cocoa here and there. The two I smoked had some mendering burns, nothing that caused problems and couldn’t be easily corrected. Overall, enjoyable cigars, and I believe Son’s has some of these limide release cigars left. I like what Jonas does at Blackbird, and I do enjoy a lot of the cigars he makes.