Cigar Salutations From The Old Glory Society*
We’ve always called it the toilet paper cigar – affectionately. When you get to know a cigar you can talk about it irreverently. Over the past twenty years, I’ve smoked over 1,000 of them. It’s a cigar you can depend on, a cigar of substance that delivers consistent satisfaction. It’s an everyday friend and every cigar smoker needs at least one of those.
I bought my first box of a cigar called the Robusto Larga at some point in the ’90s. It was my first exposure to El Rey Del Mundo cigars. I’ve smoked lots of shapes and sizes of this famous brand since, including the elusive Cuban varieties. The cigars come in a simple cedar cabinet with a sliding lid and when you folded back the white cover paper (a cross between wax paper and Christmas wrapping paper), the twenty cigars were neatly lined up and dressed cap-to-foot in white tissue paper. The yellow, gold and red cigar bands were on the outside of the tissue paper and, reflexively, you had to utter the words, What’s with the toilet paper?
Like the cigar itself, someone paid attention to detail here. The white paper, essentially tissue paper and not actually TP, was wrapped around each cigar neatly, tightly, expertly. It makes a nice presentation and I have always admired the extra effort. Still, I must admit that, over the years, the removal of the paper has been a pain in the ass, an unnecessary chore and an unwanted obstacle to the enjoyment of the product. The utility of the paper is dubious. Some call the paper “a seal to keep in the flavor” while others have argued that its purpose is to “preserve the cigar while allowing it to breathe.” Bullshit! If a simple layer of toilet paper delivered preservation qualities, all cigar makers would do it. And if it sealed in flavor why doesn’t El Rey Del Mundo wrap all of its cigars thusly? They don’t surround their Cuban cigars with toilet tissue. It’s a gimmick. I get it. I’ve seen spirited debate on the interweb about whether you should remove the paper before placing the Robusto Larga in the humidor. The consensus was to keep it on – you wouldn’t want to miss out on all that sealed-in flavor now would ya?
Not me. I strip the paper off every cigar as soon as I get a box and I’ll tell you why. It’s all about harmony in the humidor. If my other cigars see twenty newcomers coming in with fancy white outfits there could be trouble, accusations of preferential treatment. I can’t have that. Besides, cigars like to be packed into the humidor side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, their oily little wrappers rubbing up against each other. Mingling their aromas and textures and their little foreign accents makes them tastier, and it helps with morale. Do you want happy cigars or not?
The Robusto Larga comes in a lighter EMS- like wrapper but it also comes in a darker, almost black Oscuro wrapper and that’s what I suggest. As the implies, this smoke is a longer, fatter version of a traditional Robusto and the extra puffs it provides are worth it. Because it’s from Honduras it is typically strong and spicy. It’s almost always a perfect draw, burns nice and steady and rewards its owner with a beautiful light gray ash. Some days, mostly on weekends, you want to pick a special cigar and you may take an extra moment to consider your choices, but there are other times when you don’t have the time or strength to contemplate, when you almost automatically reach for a certain cigar – this is what I call the everyday cigar. An everyday cigar shouldn’t be anything fancy, it should be consistently good and, in my estimation, it should cost in the three-to-five dollar range. In all these ways, the El Rey Robusto Larga fits the bill, plus it comes with free “toilet paper” and that’s not something you come across every day.