Habanos for rookies: mild, easy and short smokess

The main characteristics that should govern the beginning of their visits to the cigar cellars of the rookies is that they choose Habanos that meet several conditions: smoothness, ease of smoking and short duration in the tasting.

There are many reasons why youngsters get started in the world of cigars, and some of them probably have to do with the tradition of having watched their parents or grandparents light up and enjoy their cigars since they were children.

Many others become rookies in their passage through the cellars of tobacconists through their incorporation into professional circles in which, during after-dinner meals at work, they see how the tasting of cigars is part of a ceremony with requirements of pleasure and luxury.

For this purpose, Habanos brands with lower strengths should be taken into account, as this will be a pleasant task without aggression for our taste buds and in which tobacco smoke pleases us in just a few seconds inside our mouths.

The ease of tasting a cigar is guaranteed by those formats whose lengths do not usually exceed 125 millimeters and are accompanied by a “cepo” (a measure determined by a figure that represents the diameter of the cigar multiplied by 64 parts of an inch) between 50 and 54.

With the two above-mentioned characteristics in place, all that remains is to ensure that the smoking time is around 45/50 minutes at the most, so that our “novices” do not get tired.

We have found that there are many more young people who are starting to smoke cigars, who in principle choose simple things and not very expensive, because a person who is starting out in this beautiful pleasure should be advised to enter with a desire to enjoy, so you have to offer cigars with pleasant nuances, elegant and with a low strength.

Among the tobacconists whose cellars are classified as Habanos Specialists (there are not many more than sixty in Spain), most of those I have consulted think that Hoyo de Monterrey is the brand, rated one out of five in strength, most appropriate for beginners, and that is why I have chosen the Petit Robusto.

Likewise, almost everyone agrees that another Habanos brand that roookies can appreciate best is H. Upmann, rated two out of five in strength, which is why this time we will be accompanied by the Mágnum 54.

And to those two brands we can add Montecristo in its Open Series, of which we have the vitola called Master, and Romeo and Juliet -both with average strengths of three out of five- with its vitola called Petit Churchills. 

It’s all about choosing Habanos of great smoothness, not at all aggressive in the mouth, so that in those seconds when the smoke leaves its trail on our taste buds, we can enjoy in a short period of time the best of the dark tobacco grown on the Cuban island, to which the indications of the master binders and the expertise of the cigar rollers in the factories’ galleys have been added.