Happy Thanksgiving by Frank Seltzer
Thanksgiving is on us this week, which means a time to stop and be thankful for all the joys and concerns in your life. It also means relatives, way too much food and football. Oh yeah, and I guess the day after Thanksgiving shopping. I do hope you all have a great holiday.
Is Bigger better?
I don’t know but it seems to be the way people are going. Part of this I am sure is the myth that the bigger the ring gauge the cooler the smoke. That’s right this is a myth. Any well made cigar will be cool. If it is badly rolled, it can be hot at any ring gauge. The bigger ring gauges are easier to roll and do allow for easy blending–often using full leaves instead of partials when in say a 42. Anyway, I still prefer coronas but there are so many big ring gauges..like EPC’s the Inch, now comes word from Pepin Garcia:
As times change, smoking preferences change and the new trend for consumers is the 60-ring-gauge cigar. There is now a new size in the My Father line and one in the Don Pepin Garcia Original.
In the My Father line we have added the My Father #6, a box pressed Toro Gordo 6 x 60, in an 18 cigar count box. This box will have the beautiful and signature packaging of My Father, but will be in three rows of 6, a new style for this line. Suggested retail price for the My Father #6 is $12.00 per cigar. For the Don Pepin Garcia Original we will be releasing a 6 x 62 Toro Grande, also box pressed in an 18 cigar count box, with traditional Don Pepin Garcia packaging in rows of 6. Suggested retail price for the Don Pepin Garcia Original Toro Grande is $9.50.
The cigars are shipping in the next couple of weeks and will be available before the holidays.
Cigar Festival
Last weekend (Saturday the 17th to be exact) was the 14th annual Ybor City Heritage and Cigar Festival in Tampa. The yearly event benefits the Ybor City Museum Society.
The festival is the museum society’s largest fundraiser. The museum, at 1818 E. Ninth Ave., was established in 1977 in the refurbished Ferlita Bakery building, which dates to 1923. The museum complex, which is a state park, includes the adjacent garden and fountain, a trio of cigar workers’ houses and the museum store.
The day long event highlighted Ybor City’s role in the cigar industry and in honor of Arturo Fuente’s 100th anniversary, tours of historic Ybor City buildings were offered…and of course there were lots of cigars. In case you didn’t know, Ybor City was the creation of Vicente Martinez Ybor who moved his cigar manufacturing operations out of Key West in the late 1800s. Tampa’s board of trade helped Ybor buy 40 acres, which he soon increased. The result initially was a company town for Ybor’s operation and within a few years, the other cigar manufacturers in Key West moved up to Tampa to join him. At its peak in 1929, Ybor City made 500-million cigars a year. Today J.C.Newman is the sole remaining factory which used to make Cuesta Rey’s in the building and today makes several machine made cigars there.
18th annual
Lastly, I need to brag a bit. On Friday, we will be holding our 18th annual Post Turkey Day Crawl in Dallas. From what I can determine this is the oldest ongoing cigar crawl/event in the country. (We are one year older than CA’s Big Smoke, but then again they get a lot more people.) The crawl began as an idea on the old newsgroup Alt Smokers Cigars when Dr. Marc Schneiderman was coming to Dallas to visit his in-laws over Thanksgiving. The idea was while others went out shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, a bunch of guys in the Dallas area would get together, hit a few stores and then have dinner. Back then, it was easy finding locales for the dinner. Today, not so much. But the tradition continues and our dinner –now called the Chris Edmonson Memorial dinner, to mark Chris’s passing and to acknowledge his tremendous efforts in putting the initial crawls and the Dallas cigar group together. Over the years we have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity and I am sure this year will be no exception.
