The Green Monkey
Brap-brap
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2008
- Messages
- 1,404
Disclaimer: This is my first review other than my personal notes scribbled in my journal, so please forgive any oversights...
After 10 days of restraint, I finally succumbed to the sweet siren song of the sticks Seadub sent me in the NST.
I fired up a 2 year old Padron 3000 Maduro. It was my first experience with an aged cigar.
I was absolutely blown away. Without a doubt the most pleasant, enjoyable, and sublime cigar I've had thus far. I decided well before I was halfway through that it was so good I was going to smoke it down to nothing so I went in the house to get a paperclip.
The construction was top notch, with the stick retaining the rectangularity of the box pressing all the way to the end. Very even burn throughout, no fiddling or touching up required. The ash seemed substantial enough that I was tempted to try to hold the cigar by it at one point.
The first third was very creamy and mellow, with thick, rich, abundant smoke throughout. The taste changed after about a third to an intermingled mixture of leather, coffee, wood, and an uncharacterizable sweetness. The flavor built and built, with a very mild spicy sweetness emerging around the last quarter, finishing with a more pronounced sweetness at the nub.
I think I stopped one puff short of burning myself. I wish it had been a foot longer. I can't believe it's a $4 cigar. I was still basking in some strange sense of satisfied afterglow for several hours afterwards, and it made me feel warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about it the following morning.
I PMed Seadub to tell him how much I enjoyed it, and to ask whether he thought that the deliciousness was more of a function of the cigar or the age on it, and inquired whether he thought that I was setting myself up for disappointment by hoping that any subsequent fresh 3000s from my B&M would measure up. He pointed out that there was only one way to find out, and that I ought to smoke a fresh one as soon as possible.
I stopped by my shop the next afternoon and picked up four, and they were the first ones out of the box, so presumably they were at about the freshest end of the spectrum that I'll ever likely find. I went home and fired one up an hour later.
The fresh one I smoked had one much darker leaf rolled into it, almost giving the cross-section a marbled rye sort of look. I don't remember the aged one looking like that (although I don't know that I consciously looked at it) and to the best that I can tell without removing the cellophane of the other 3, none of them have a renegade much darker leaf either. I also absolutely butchered the cut on the fresh one.
Caveats aside, it was very interesting comparing the two. They were obviously the same cigar, but the aged one was more subtle, nuanced, and complex, while the newer one had less variation throughout (same coffee and sweet/chocolate taste, but less leather in the middle) and was more overt, I guess you could say. The end of both of them had the same sweet and spicy duel going on (while I nubbed the aged one, I only smoked the new one down to about 3/4", not because I didn’t want to keep smoking it, but because it was suffering from my maiming cut job) but the aged one was more of a simultaneous blending, whereas the new one seemed to be more either/or. It wasn't totally binary, but most of the time one flavor was overwhelming the other instead of coexisting in equal parts as with the aged version. The box pressing wasn't nearly as prominent in the new one (quite possibly due to my massacre at the shoulder) and it sort of lost a bit of cohesion towards the end. I had a glass or two of Ron Zacapa Centenario 23 year old with both cigars.
I guess the best way I could describe the comparison would be to analogize it to a Big Mac. Sometimes you get one where the proportions, construction, temperature, etc., is all top notch (relatively speaking, of course) and while the ingredients are all the same as they ever are, it just seems so much better than usual. I'd compare the aged one to the A+ Big Mac, and the new one to a pretty darn good (but by no means world-beating) Big Mac. Same ingredients and conceptualizing the differences is next to impossible, yet it's perfectly clear that one was superior to the other. If this comparison may seem like I'm overcritical of the newer one--that isn't my intention at all--a better comparison might be a hot woman you see at the grocery store compared to an Angelina Jolie or a Scarlett Johansson movie starlet type. Very similar, and nothing bad about either of them, but one of them is just in a rarified league of their own. It was still one of my most enjoyable smokes to date, and I'm glad Seadub turned me on to them. I expect them to play a very prominent role in whatever rotation I eventually develop. The price certainly can't be beat, either.
I’m going to head back to the B&M later this afternoon to pick up a few more. I don’t want to smoke any of the remaining 3 I have anytime soon, as every second counts in the aging game, and I don’t want to wait four days longer than I have to before I can smoke another one with a couple of years on it.
After 10 days of restraint, I finally succumbed to the sweet siren song of the sticks Seadub sent me in the NST.
I fired up a 2 year old Padron 3000 Maduro. It was my first experience with an aged cigar.
I was absolutely blown away. Without a doubt the most pleasant, enjoyable, and sublime cigar I've had thus far. I decided well before I was halfway through that it was so good I was going to smoke it down to nothing so I went in the house to get a paperclip.
The construction was top notch, with the stick retaining the rectangularity of the box pressing all the way to the end. Very even burn throughout, no fiddling or touching up required. The ash seemed substantial enough that I was tempted to try to hold the cigar by it at one point.
The first third was very creamy and mellow, with thick, rich, abundant smoke throughout. The taste changed after about a third to an intermingled mixture of leather, coffee, wood, and an uncharacterizable sweetness. The flavor built and built, with a very mild spicy sweetness emerging around the last quarter, finishing with a more pronounced sweetness at the nub.
I think I stopped one puff short of burning myself. I wish it had been a foot longer. I can't believe it's a $4 cigar. I was still basking in some strange sense of satisfied afterglow for several hours afterwards, and it made me feel warm and fuzzy inside just thinking about it the following morning.
I PMed Seadub to tell him how much I enjoyed it, and to ask whether he thought that the deliciousness was more of a function of the cigar or the age on it, and inquired whether he thought that I was setting myself up for disappointment by hoping that any subsequent fresh 3000s from my B&M would measure up. He pointed out that there was only one way to find out, and that I ought to smoke a fresh one as soon as possible.
I stopped by my shop the next afternoon and picked up four, and they were the first ones out of the box, so presumably they were at about the freshest end of the spectrum that I'll ever likely find. I went home and fired one up an hour later.
The fresh one I smoked had one much darker leaf rolled into it, almost giving the cross-section a marbled rye sort of look. I don't remember the aged one looking like that (although I don't know that I consciously looked at it) and to the best that I can tell without removing the cellophane of the other 3, none of them have a renegade much darker leaf either. I also absolutely butchered the cut on the fresh one.
Caveats aside, it was very interesting comparing the two. They were obviously the same cigar, but the aged one was more subtle, nuanced, and complex, while the newer one had less variation throughout (same coffee and sweet/chocolate taste, but less leather in the middle) and was more overt, I guess you could say. The end of both of them had the same sweet and spicy duel going on (while I nubbed the aged one, I only smoked the new one down to about 3/4", not because I didn’t want to keep smoking it, but because it was suffering from my maiming cut job) but the aged one was more of a simultaneous blending, whereas the new one seemed to be more either/or. It wasn't totally binary, but most of the time one flavor was overwhelming the other instead of coexisting in equal parts as with the aged version. The box pressing wasn't nearly as prominent in the new one (quite possibly due to my massacre at the shoulder) and it sort of lost a bit of cohesion towards the end. I had a glass or two of Ron Zacapa Centenario 23 year old with both cigars.
I guess the best way I could describe the comparison would be to analogize it to a Big Mac. Sometimes you get one where the proportions, construction, temperature, etc., is all top notch (relatively speaking, of course) and while the ingredients are all the same as they ever are, it just seems so much better than usual. I'd compare the aged one to the A+ Big Mac, and the new one to a pretty darn good (but by no means world-beating) Big Mac. Same ingredients and conceptualizing the differences is next to impossible, yet it's perfectly clear that one was superior to the other. If this comparison may seem like I'm overcritical of the newer one--that isn't my intention at all--a better comparison might be a hot woman you see at the grocery store compared to an Angelina Jolie or a Scarlett Johansson movie starlet type. Very similar, and nothing bad about either of them, but one of them is just in a rarified league of their own. It was still one of my most enjoyable smokes to date, and I'm glad Seadub turned me on to them. I expect them to play a very prominent role in whatever rotation I eventually develop. The price certainly can't be beat, either.
I’m going to head back to the B&M later this afternoon to pick up a few more. I don’t want to smoke any of the remaining 3 I have anytime soon, as every second counts in the aging game, and I don’t want to wait four days longer than I have to before I can smoke another one with a couple of years on it.
