Hoyo de Monterrey Petite Robustos

Hailing from 2004, the Hoyo de Monterrey Petite Robustos was a trendsetter for the brand, and for Habanos generally. At release it was the first of its vitola, both salida and galera; the first front-line skirmisher of the short-and-fat brigade that would come to dominate the new release lists for the next fifteen years.

To me, the petite robusto has always looked a little off, its girth heralding a grander cigar than the length can deliver, and begging the question, “where’s the rest?” Lit, it is bitter from the start, with an acrid woody tang. I set it down a moment, and it calms down a bit, relaxing into light wood and medium tobacco.

Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robustos unlit

I’ve known a few delinquents in my time, but rarely have I been in as close contact with the criminal element as I was with Simon Cates in the summer of ‘aught five. It was six months into my relationship with Audrey (and about two years before the Parisian Encounter). We both lived with our respective parents, but that summer hers had gone to Europe on The Trip of a Lifetime – three months riding the canals of Germany, France and the Netherlands – and Audrey and I were playing house.

Audrey had a summer job as a research assistant, which kept her busy for most of the daylight hours. I had no need of a job, having emancipated myself from my parents a year or so prior, which made me eligible for the government cheques. I spent my days mainly playing video games in her father’s study. The long summer days also gave me plenty of opportunity to bond with the house’s other resident layabout, Audrey’s eighteen-year-old brother, Simon (Simmy, to his friends).

They were siblings, and had similar noses, but that was about it. Audrey had attended an exclusive private school for gifted girls. She spoke with a vestigial British accent, and her friends were snobbish pseudo-intellectuals. Simmy had attended the local high school, and spoke with the languid drawl of a suburban thug, and his friends did the same. Audrey was blonde, with clear blue eyes and porcelain skin. She was against all physical activity, and deemed ballgames the pastime of the troglodyte. Simmy was tan and swarthy, and a natural athlete. Above all, Audrey was a member of society, and followed society’s rules. For Simmy there was no such thing.

The house was built into the side of a hill, and sprawled over three floors. Audrey and I occupied what was normally her parents’ domain on the top level. The bottom floor was Simmy territory. The open kitchen and dining room on the middle level were common property.

I rarely ventured down into Simmy’s crypt, but whenever I did the scene was much the same. He would be shirtless, reclined on the couch. Draped nearby would be Kate, his impossibly long-legged high-school girlfriend, clad only in one of Simmy’s basketball singlets and a blissful post-coital expression. His tubby friend Dave would be lying on the floor. The television would be playing an action movie, and all about would be strewn bongs and nangs and packets of chips. The marijuana scent was palpable, and as his parent’s return drew closer he would become increasingly concerned about how irreparably it had penetrated the soft furnishings.

On the second day of my residence, I was aroused from my Grand Theft Auto by a commotion on the kitchen deck. Investigating, I found Simmy and Dave in the process of heaving the family microwave over the railing to the lawn below. They had chanced upon a crime of opportunity: an open truck full of brand new microwaves, and helped themselves. I suggested that instead of destroying their parents’ perfectly serviceable microwave, they could sell either it or the new one for cash, but they weren’t interested. I then offered the idea that they could destroy it in a more spectacular fashion by microwaving a deodorant can or something. They thought about that one, but decided it was too much trouble, and over the railing the appliance went. Dented but largely intact, it would stay on the lawn until the night before his parents came back.

Audrey and I were both fending for ourselves for the first time, and were shocked by how expensive grocery bills could be. When we went shopping we were frugal, buying simple meals, and mostly cooking ourselves. For Simmy though the world was his oyster. Several times a week he and his friends would come home fully laden with purloined frozen meals and meats and candies and every delicacy of the suburban supermarket. I was amazed every time. For myself, I couldn’t see how it was possible to heist more than a chocolate bar, but Simmy seemed to be able to liberate the weekly shop for a family of ten. When I asked him how he did it he was nonchalant. “Just carry it out” he told me. “Nobody cares.”

Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robustos, two thirds remaining

With the third of so of the cigar combusted, the bitterness has left, but what remains is very much the par three hole of the Monterrey course. Mostly it tastes of cedar dust, with a mild herbaceous twang in the aftertaste.

Audrey was universally disapproving of Simmy and his antics, but I became something of a friend to him and his buddies, not exactly approving, but definitely impressed. More than anything I was fascinated by a life so free of societal norms. One afternoon Simmy knocked on my study door clutching a little medical pouch. “Hey mate” he asked, “do you know how to fill up a needle?”

As it happened I did, having acquired the skill while caring for my family’s diabetic dog. Simmy had gotten his hands on some steroid injections, and wanted me help him shoot them into the meaty part of his buttock. For the next two weeks it became a ritual for us – he would come by after lunch, usually – and I would give him his injection. Eventually he gave it up because he wasn’t working out enough to see the benefit.

Halfway through the summer he came to Audrey and I and announced with great pride that he’d gotten a job. Starting Monday he was the new night watchman at the Tennis Centre. Audrey was pleased, although in bed that night we privately wondered if Rod Laver knew he was employing a fox to guard his henhouse. It took Simmy only three shifts to figure out how to turn off the cameras and open up the pro-store, and after that he would come home every morning with thousands of dollars’ worth of sneakers and racquets. As always with Simmy, there wasn’t any consequence. When he was fired some months later it was for absenteeism, not for thievery.

Audrey and I broke up not long after the end of the summer. After her parents came home she had wanted us to find our own place together, but I was content to go back to my folks’ place, where the groceries came gratis. We would reconcile for a time a few years later, but eventually parted for good. Last I heard, Simmy had done a few months in prison in his twenties for low-level drug dealing, but eventually straightened out, working a variety of labourer jobs before starting a landscape gardening business. He eventually married Kate, too, high-school sweethearts, and fathered twin girls. No word on what became of Dave.

Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robustos, the final chunk.

The Petite Robustos lightens up considerably in the bottom half of the cigar, but doesn’t gain a lot in the way of complexity, with the usual wood, grass, and slight tang predominating.

The marketing impetus behind the short and fat revolution is that nobody has the time to smoke big cigars any more. To some extent, the marketeers have a point. Gone are the days of smoking in offices, in gentlemen’s clubs, in restaurants and bars, and other places where men might once have engaged in otherwise meaningful activity with a Churchill clamped between their teeth. The aficionado will always find a way to luxuriate at home with a big cigar, but for the habitual smoker, who smokes two, and four, and five a day, they need it short and to some extent they need it fat. Something to suck down while driving between landscape gardening jobs. In that capacity, the Hoyo Petite Robusto succeeds. It’s an easy-going, uncomplicated sort of smoke that you could get down in 30 minutes if you put your mind to it.

Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robustos nub.

Hoyo de Monterrey Petite Robustos on the Cuban Cigar Website

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial

The Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial made its first appearance in 2004 as an Edition Limitada, where it proved so popular that they made it a regular production four years later. It was ahead of its time; the third example of the Gorditos vitola, a size which has appeared in the “new releases” column of the Habanos catalogue fifteen times since, and continues to resurface on an annual basis. I wondered at the time why they called it the Epicure Especial, and not the Epicure No. 3, which seemed to me a more logical name for a cigar that was basically a longer Epicure No. 2. Whatever their reasoning was I guess it worked for them, as they have continued the trend with the Double Epicure, the Grand Epicure, and the Epicure de Luxe.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial unlit

I light her up. Construction is not great, with a wind tunnel draw that makes the initial burn far too hot, the smoke bitter as a result. Hopefully it will clean up as things stabilize. What flavor notes there are are woody and slightly chemical. Treated pine.

I met Saskiri Sutrisno online. Her profile was vague. She liked some TV shows. She liked to travel. Her pictures, all close-ups with big sunglasses, gave little indication of how she looked. She was enthusiastic, though, when she reached out to me and gushed about the bombastic essay that I used to promote my own eligibility. Enthusiasm goes a long way. It was a clear case for a low stakes internet date.

We met on a Tuesday night outside the State Library, because it’s a public place that everybody knows and because there’s nothing to do there. If you hate each other from the first moment then you’re not even committed to finishing your coffee. It was a Tuesday because nobody has anything better to do on a Tuesday.

We went to a nearby bar and immediately hit it off. She had been raised a diplo-brat, the child of a big wheel in the Indonesian kleptocracy of the 1980s and 90s, and we swapped stories about our childhoods in diplomatic enclaves. She laughed and smiled, with a big, wet mouth, and eyes to match. I liked her summer dress.

After the bar the date carried on to a restaurant, where the casual touching started; the clasp of the hand on the table to emphasize a point, the faux sympathetic shoulder pat. On the way to the third bar I held her hand. “Good move,” she whispered.

By the time the third bar closed it was a quarter passed midnight and we were two martinis passed sensible. We necked heavily in an alleyway.

Through the fog of Wednesday morning, I related the story to a friend. “I think this could be the one,” I told him. “She’s funny and smart and beautiful. She’s got Indonesian gangster money. Relax and Rolex.”

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial two thirds remain.

True to expectation, the cigar has mellowed off considerably. There are notes of straw and cedar, with light dry earth and dust. There is a vague peanut flavor in the late taste. Some salt.

For the most part, my affair with Saskiri was a lot of fun. She worked in finance at one of those jobs where everyone is young and bubbly and drinks late every night. She fell for that old routine, the one where I throw on a robe and casually put together cocktails in my grand apartment. She lived in the hipster area, and we had nice breakfasts and sneered cynically at everything. She had a fun set of nicknames: Sass, Sassafrass, Sasquatch, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Once, she crashed one of my work functions just as it was winding down, and smiled and laughed and enthralled the older guys. “Who was that girl?” my boss asked me the next morning. “An old friend?”
“Ah…no” I replied. “More of a new friend.”

I wasn’t wrong about the gangster money, either. She showed me pictures of herself at age four, being bounced on Suharto’s knee. Then came the family portrait: ten Sutrisnos and twenty staff, all in their Sunday best outside an ambassadorial residence. The women and girls wore matching white dresses. The men and boys were in suits and brandished AK-47s.

But then, there were the problems.

Most of them were minor. She snored like a rhinoceros. She had terrible taste in movies. She was always on her phone. And, of course, that old complaint started to surface; the one that has driven most every lover from my life. She liked me, and she needed to express that to me, and to hear it expressed in return. The needier she got the less my broken psychology wanted to validated her.

The final straw came on July 1. It was a Wednesday, and she was celebrating Canada Day at a bar near my house. She texted me repeatedly, asking me to join her. When I finally arrived she was drunk, and slurring her words, and going on and on about how she couldn’t believe two of her friends had hooked up. It wasn’t the event for me, and inside an hour I was ready to go. When I told her so, and a twenty-minute song-and-dance ensued about whether or not she would come to my house. Her complex iterations of logistics are lost on me even today, but basically, I felt that as we both had busy days the next day, the dominant strategy would be for her to come and be intimate for an hour or so, and then get a cab home; she was steadfast that she was only coming to my house if she could stay the night.

She fell asleep immediately post-coitus, stealing all the blanket and snoring at the volume of industrial machinery. Several times I tried to wake her, or roll her over, or to smother her, but it was all in vain, and by 3am I abandoned my bed and went to sleep in the spare room. There I slept soundly until five, when she shook me awake. “What are you doing in here?” she asked. “Was I snoring?” I moaned concurrence. “Oh my god,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She climbed into bed with me, the spare room’s single considerably less accommodating than my king, and fell asleep at once, immediately resuming her cacophony.

I was curt with her in the morning. She was sheepish, and knew she was in trouble. Once she’d gone I went upstairs to make the beds, and discovered that both sheets were heavily bloodstained. She had a cut on her leg, that apparently had opened up.

It was the final straw, and when she sheepishly texted me three days later, I let her know that it was over. She didn’t reply, but a few hours later I noticed she’d unfriended me on Facebook.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial, burnt just above the band.

The Epicure Especial ends a little spicy, with a sharp tar that is not altogether unpleasant. There is still some dry dirt in the aftertaste. A few weeks ago, a friend, having read the first few of this season’s Dusky Beauties observed to me that Hoyo might be a bit mild for my taste. I’m sorry to say it, but I think he might be right. Hopefully there is some gold deeper in the limiteds, because as far as the regular production goes, it all seems to be much of the same.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial nub.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial on the Cuban Cigar Website