Stronger, darker version of the Honduran brand shipping next month Share Photos/General Cigar Co.
The Hoyo de Monterrey Excalibur brand turns 40 this year, and General Cigar Co. is celebrating the milestone with the upcoming Excalibur Black, a Honduran cigar set to ship on June 7.
“With Excalibur Black, we are beginning the next chapter of the brand’s 40-year legacy with a feisty, fuller-bodied offering,” said Ed Lahmann, senior brand manager for Excalibur.
Billed as being medium in body, Excalibur Black is stronger than the core Excalibur blend, and consists of a Connecticut broadleaf wrapper, Ecuador Sumatra binder, and filler of Honduran and Nicaraguan tobacco.
Share Photo/General Cigar Co.
Fans of mild cigars now have another option to look forward to. The Macanudo Gold Label, a cigar brand that makes a yearly appearance in cigar shops, was released last week by General Cigar Co. and will be shipping to retailers until July 30, or when stocks are depleted. With this year’s allotment comes a new, limited-edition size: the 6 inch by 60 ring gauge Gigantes.
Like the core Macanudo Café line, Macanudo Gold is made with wrapper leaf grown in Connecticut under shade. But cigars from the Gold line are even milder than regular Macanudos, as they’re covered in lighter, lower-priming wrappers that grow closer to the bottom of the tobacco plant. This lower position on the stalk means less sun exposure, a smoother appearance and a light color.
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If you’re one to smoke an infused cigar by Drew Estate, a coffee-flavored NUB or any other flavored cigar or cigarillo, your days of enjoying cigars like this might be numbered. Today, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration announced a plan to ban all flavored cigars. That ban is part of a larger effort to ban menthol flavoring in cigarettes, the last permissible flavor since all other flavors of cigarettes were banned in 2009.
According to the FDA, the ban on flavored cigarettes inadvertently lead to increased use of flavored cigars. “After the 2009 statutory ban on flavors in cigarettes other than menthol, use of flavored cigars increased dramatically, suggesting that the public health goals of the flavored cigarette ban may have been undermined by continued availability of these flavored cigars,” said the FDA, via a press release issued today.
Forged Cigar Co. has announced its second new release for La Gloria Cubana: Medio Tiempo.
The new La Gloria Cubana Medio Tiempo is a regular production line that uses an Ecuadorian sumatran wrapper over a Connecticut broadleaf binder and filler tobaccos from four different areas: the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua and Connecticut. The Connecticut tobacco is the one where the cigar gets its name from, it’s a Connecticut habano varietal that is classified as medio tiempo.
Medio tiempo is a priming of tobacco the way a plant is divided into sections vertically that is found above the ligero priming, typically the highest priming. It’s only found on certain plans and only some growers go through the effort of classifying it separately from ligero. Given its position on the plant, medio tiempo should be the strongest tobacco found on the plants where it grows. In recent years, a variety of manufacturers have marketed their cigars as explicitly containing medio tiempo tobacc
Partagas Notes that this only includes the U.S. distribution rights for these brands, which are separate from the Cuban versions of these cigars.
Some of these brands like Bolivar and Partagas are ones that General has tried to remake multiple times, seemingly not very successfully. So on one hand it’s not surprising to see STG trying something else, but Forged Cigar Co. is a pretty drastic step that left many including General’s competitors quite confused.
The company says it’s a multi-million dollar investment, which included the hiring of 12 sales representatives, making the brand new Forged Cigar Co. one of the largest sales teams in the cigar industry. STG says that Forged will also receive marketing support and, of course, new products.