Cohiba Mágicos

The Cohiba Mágicos is my least favourite in the Cohiba Maduro 5 Line, although if I’m honest I can’t say I’ve ever given them much of a chance.

When the Maduro’s first came out, I smoked a lot of the other two – between 2007 and 2009 I sucked down at least a few boxes each of the Genios the Secretos. Aside from their stupid names (a top end luxury line in 2007 called “Genies”, “Magical”, and “Secrets”, come on), I loved them. I wasn’t much of a Limited Edition smoker at the time, and the maduros had a chocolaty richness that was new to me in cigars. I’m sure the Mágicos had it too, but I never could find a place in my heart for the size. The Secretos was a fun little firecracker you could smoke in mixed company without being too obnoxious. The Genios was a big luxurious smoke to enjoy around other cigar smokers. The Mágicos was an early starter in the trend of short fat cigars that try and cram all punch of a big robusto into something you can smoke in under an hour. They weren’t for me. I need some length before I can enjoy the girth.

After those first few years of heavy Maduro smoking, I more or less moved on from the line. My cigar budget has only increased in the intervening decade, but the prices of Cohiba have increased faster. By all accounts, the glory days of the Maduro line have long passed, with Cohiba shifting their best people onto the BHKs or the old classics, and the Maduros languish today as the black sheep of the El Laguito flock. If I’m going to spend Cohiba money, I only want the best.

Cohiba Mágicos unlit

Once lit, the Mágicos begins pretty well. Smooth and earthy, with a little sourness. Musty wood, slowly dissolving in the underbrush.

There was a summer at the very start of our twenties that the folklore remembers as The Summer of Buckley, for what seemed like an epic sexual rampage that our least-assuming friend embarked upon. Up until then (and for the most part, ever since), Buckley had been a very nice boy; the kind of kid that a mother could be proud of. He didn’t drink, and certainly didn’t smoke or drug. His romantic history consisted of three teenage relationships, each lasting more than a year and separated by only a week or so of ‘single life.’ He remained on good terms with all of them. Two of them had left him with their virginity intact.

At the start of the summer, Buckley’s incumbent girlfriend was getting ready for a trip abroad on the classic European student vacation. She would be seeing the continental sights by day, before spending late nights in backpacker bars, and sleeping in dirty hostel beds. Imagining that at some point along the Costa del Sol a handsome Spaniard tight pants and a heavy tan might find his way into one of those beds, the night before she departed, she took Buckley aside for a serious talk.

“I’ve been thinking” she said, “and I want to go on a break this summer. I really love you and I want to be with you, but I don’t want to ruin my holiday wishing you were with me. Let’s take a few months off and have fun. We’ll get back together when I come back. Enjoy your summer!”

Buckley was devastated. For a week, he moped around his share house, picturing his girlfriend dancing the salsa under the stars, with Mediterranean hands low on her waist. At the end of the week he came up angry. “Fine” he thought. “If she wants to just have fun this summer, let’s have some fun.”

He called me wanting to know if I had a party for us to go to, and as it happened, I did. Nice had invited me to a poker night.

Nice (pronounced like the city) was in a group of friends that intersected with mine, but she was way cooler than any of my set. I found her very intimidating, but super sexy. She was Ukrainian, and had that Eastern European sneer. She didn’t mind telling you exactly what she thought of you. She chain-smoked hand rolled cigarettes, and you could hear it in her voice. It was always unsettling talking to her. I was never sure if she was flirting with me or mocking me, and I felt like she wanted me to feel that way.

The door to her house was ajar when Buckley and I arrived. We wandered in, and found the party gathered in the kitchen. Nice was leaning against the doorframe, smoking.

“Hello boys,” she said, in her husky whisper. “Welcome.”

We had bought drinks with us to split: a pair of Stones Ginger Beers, and a bottle of 100 Pipers Scotch, which was the cheapest available at the time. The idea was that we would take a swig from the bottle of ginger beer and then top it off with the whisky, with the logic being that the mix would progressively get stronger and by the time we were down to straight scotch, we would be drunk enough not to notice the flavour. I also had a couple of Montecristo No.4s.

The game began. Besides Buckley and myself, the players were Nice, her housemate Sarah, another girlfriend and two other guys I knew vaguely from school. Everyone was smoking. I lit my cigar, and the other got passed around, becoming soggy from many wet lips. The bottle of whisky began to empty.

Sarah was the first to run out of chips. Without discussion, she took off her top and dealt herself into the next hand.

I have only been involved in a few games of strip-poker, and in none of the others has any female ever taken off anything significant. In most cases they’re coyly removing an earing or a sock while I’m down to my briefs. Not this one.

The game continued, and Nice began to lose hand after hand. I was still mostly fully clothed, as were Buckley and Sarah. It was coming up to midnight, and the others had departed not long after the clothes started to go. Nice had lost her shoes and socks and jacket and earrings and hair-ties. When all that had gone, she took off her jeans, keeping her legs under the table while she did it. Things got more serious when she lost her top, and we got to enjoy her red lacy bra for a few hands before that too was removed. Finally, she lost her last pot. She stood up, removed her panties and tossed them on the table.

“Game over” she declared. “Let’s go to the park.”

Cohiba Mágicos partially burnt

By the midpoint the Mágicos is showing up with some strength and a bit more tar than I’d really like. There is definitely the sweetness of the other maduros, but it doesn’t quite come to chocolate. A charitable man might call it spicy. At least I can’t fault the construction – the burn is razor sharp and the draw is perfect.

By the time we arrived at the park, the fog of whisky was intense. Nice and I sat down on one of those log fences that surround all Australian playgrounds of a certain era, and began making out without much discussion. Buckley and Sarah had climbed into the playground tower, and the sound of their giggles belayed a similar occupation.

I had a foul taste in my mouth from the tar of the cigar and the cheap whisky, which was almost strong enough that I couldn’t taste Nice’s musty cigarette smoker’s breath. After a few minutes of entwined tongues, she withdrew a moment and considered me.

“Too much cheese, perhaps?”
“Sorry” I stammered. “I think it’s the cigar”

It didn’t deter her. After the poker game, she had never properly dressed herself, just pulling a windbreaker on over her bare torso. I unzipped it and slipped my hand inside.

We went back to the house, and Nice disappeared. Sarah was making up a bed for Buckley on the loungeroom floor, while I stood awkwardly in the hallway. When she passed me on a trip to the linen closet, I asked her where I should sleep.

“You’re in there” she said, pointing at the closed door of Nice’s room.

I timidly knocked and let myself in. Nice was in the bathroom, and when she came back I mumbled that Sarah had told me I was sleeping in here. Nice threw me a sneer, but didn’t throw me out. Fully dressed, I climbed into her bed. She joined me in a t-shirt and lacy red underwear. We made out for a while, our hands roaming unhindered under inside each other’s shirts, and mine briefly inside her panties. Coital love making did not occur, although not because either party rejected the idea. We were just a bit too drunk and tired to go through the motions. At some point I passed out.

A scant few hours later I was jolted awake by her alarm.

“I’ve got to go to work” she hissed, getting dressed in the dark. “You can stay here.”

I went back to sleep, and once the sun was high in the sky I got up and poked my head into the loungeroom. Buckley was still unconscious, with Sarah naked beside him.

Later, on the tram home I asked him how he did.

“Yeah, I fucked her” he replied. “How’d you go?”
“Yeah, me too.”

We high-fived.

Cohiba Mágicos burnt to just before the band

As the coal of the Mágicos reaches the band, things are much unchanged. The tar is still present, but it hasn’t grown stronger and isn’t causing an issue. The earthiness is rich and muddy. The tobacco strength at this point is full, leaving a nicotine tingle on the lips.

I don’t know why I never called Nice after that night. I definitely should have. I liked her, and she seemed to like me. Even having necked with her, I couldn’t get passed the intimidation. I guess I kind of hoped that I’d run into her at a party again some day and it could be “one of those things.”

Even without seeing her, six months later I managed to blow up whatever chance I had.

I was sitting in a beer garden in Brunswick at one of my friend’s birthdays, and got chatting to his older brother and his older brother’s girlfriend. It eventuated that she’d been to the same school as a few of my female friends. She started rattling of names.

“Do you know Victoria Sargent?”
“Yeah! The ballerina? Of course.”
“How about Minh Nguyen?”
“I dated her for a while in year 10!”
“Wait, you don’t know Nice do you?”
“Only in the biblical sense! I slept with her at a party one time!”

The girlfriend looked delighted at the gossip.

“Oh wow… we’re pretty good friends, and she definitely never mentioned that.”

I tried to backpedal, but the damage was done. About a week later I got a scathing email from Nice that began “it’s not nice to kiss and tell, especially when it’s not even true” and continued apace for several paragraphs. She used the word “liar” repeatedly, and insinuated that the only reason she hadn’t had sex with me that night was because I was impotent. She still would have done it later, though, if I wasn’t too much of a coward to give her a call. She concluded that it probably worked out for the best. She doubted she’d even be able to feel my tiny dick inside her.

I tried to smooth things over, with a jokey mae culpa. I offered to buy her a steak dinner to make up for smear on her reputation. Her response email was less verbose.

“No chance, loser.”

Cohiba Mágicos nub, lying amongst its ashes

In the end, the Mágicos is not such a bad cigar. It never made me want to spit, which I feel couldn’t be said of the same size from a lesser marque, although I certainly did feel the need to wash it down with a few slugs of Mornington Porter.

As for where it sits in the ranking? Well, if you ground up the tobacco and put it gram-for-gram against the leaf in the Siglo II, the Mágicos would probably come up on top. That isn’t how these things work though. If I had both cigars in my humidor, there is almost no occasion where the Mágicos would be the one I reached for.

Cohiba Mágicos on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Cohiba Siglo II

The tradition of this column, as the old timers tell it, is that the first cigar I light in any a new season is the fundamental example of the breed. The quintessential cigar that sums it up for any occasion. The “go to.”

Cohiba, however, is not a brand for just any occasion. Once the private marque of Fidel Castro, today it is mainly for the Chinese nouveau riche. The occasion when you reach for a Cohiba is when you want somebody to know that you’re the boss.

The Siglo II is by no means the quintessential Cohiba, and I doubt anybody much reaches for it very often. If you want a Cohiba, you want one with a bit of heft to it. You want a Behike 56. A Siglo VI. Maybe a Robusto if you’re pressed for time. Maybe a Lanceros if you’re an educated man.

I am giving the Siglo II the first smoke, however, purely because of its vitola de galera. The Siglo II is a Marevas; 42 ring by 129mm. The same size as the Montecristo 4, and a great many other quintessential cigars besides. It is long enough that you know you’re smoking a cigar, but short enough that you’re not back too late from lunch.

The example in question has a perfect domed marble head; a construction style that was once the standard for all Cuban cigars but since the 1970s has been rare, remaining only as a signature flourish for master rollers.

Cohiba Siglo II unlit

Lit, the first notes are a little more bitter than I’d like, but obviously first class, with black coffee over toasted grains. The draw is perfect.

One Easter Sunday some years passed I was coming off about three months of heavy internet dating; two nights a week walking the never-ending trail in search of something better than bachelorhood. Some dates were terrible, and ended with a hasty skolling of the first drink and pressing ‘unmatch’ on the app on my way out the door. Other dates went a little better, and we’d laugh and stay out late, and although things weren’t so good that I’d kiss her at the end, I’d still walk away thinking there might be something there. The next day I’d message to see if she wanted another go around, and in reply she’d say she liked me but “not in a romantic way.”

Once in a while, the dates would go very well, and the girl would end up in my bed. In the morning when she was gone, I’d lie there, my pillow still rich with her scent, and I’d try and imagine a life with her. Inevitably I would find some imperfection that seemed like it would drive me to insanity when subjected to a lifetime of it. Somewhat regretfully, but not wanting to waste her time, I’d send her a text: “I had a great time with you last night, but just being totally honest, I don’t really see it getting serious with you. Would be happy to see you a couple more times though if you’re keen.”

It was generally met with outrage. I couldn’t fault them for it.

The same cycle had played out time and time again, and I had resolved to end it. No more would I cast girls aside for some perceived minor flaw. It was Easter Sunday, and it was time that I became a better man. From now on I would see that the beauty of a rose is perfected by its thorns.

To be honest, I didn’t need a date that night. On Easter Saturday I had been out all night at a very druggy party. I hadn’t had a lot of sleep, and my dopamine levels were low. Elspeth and I had been chatting online for a week or so, and we were at the point where it was time to either meet in person or ghost her, so when she messaged with “how about we get together tonight?” I was a coinflip whether to accept the date or spend the night at home alone watching a movie. I decided that now was as good as any time to get it over with.

We met on the steps of the State Library and headed to a cocktail bar a few blocks down the road. She had chin length brown hair and a Mediterranean nose, and came off as shy, running through her chit chat with a wide-eyed hesitation. At first glance she looked like any Melbournite, dressed in black and grey, but if you looked a little closer, you’d see that she had some style. I would later learn that she shopped exclusively from Japanese fashion websites and it showed. Her things were just cut a little better than we see in Australia.

At the end of the first drink I was surprised when she consented to a second. My energy levels were through the floor, and she seemed nervous and uncomfortable. At the end of the second drink, I was even more surprised when she suggested we move to another bar. After six drinks at three venues I suggested we head to my place, and wasn’t at all surprised when she agreed.

Post coital, with her head nestled on my shoulder, I felt a deep affection for her.

“You know” I said, running a finger down her flank, “I’m sure you don’t think it, but you’re really very pretty. You have your little imperfections. Your nose. Your butt is too big. But you have nice eyes, and your stomach is flat, and your legs are long, and your tits are perfectly shaped. It might not be the Vogue Magazine idea of beauty, but everything is in proportion, and added up you look better than any of those bitches. You’re beautiful.”

She blushed and kissed me.

Cohiba Siglo II, about half smoked

Halfway gone, and the Siglo II is coming along nicely, with the classic Cohiba notes of grass and hay up front, and honey sweetness in the aftertaste. Above all it exhibits the smoothness that is the hallmark of Cohiba, and all true premium tobacco.

Elspeth was the artistic sort, a museum curator, and on our first date, somewhere after the third drink, I had tried to boost my intellectual credentials by mentioning The Harem. “It masquerades as cigar reviews” I had said, “but really I use it to tell my life story, one anecdote at a time, with poetic prose and a literary sensibility. I elevate the form.” When she told me she would read it, I grimaced, immediately regretting my braggadocio. “Please don’t.”

The second date went well enough, but for one incident. She mentioned in passing that she was bad with money, deep in credit card debt from years of unsustainable spending. Ever the attack dog, I teased her about it, taking care of the bills from then on, but never without a smirking “I’d better get this.” After the fifth time, she put on her serious voice and asked me to stop.

The third date was magical. Using her connections at the museum she took us to the warehouse where the exhibits not on display are stored, and we held hands as we walked down long aisles of curios, while she pointed out her favourites. In the taxidermy section we kissed, observed by the glassy eyes of a thousand staring creatures. I liked her a lot in that moment. She had her flaws, to be sure, but they were just part of her easy charm.

Later that night we had our first fight.

We were post coital again, preparing for sleep. There are two varieties of pillow on my bed, some low loft ones made of hard latex, which I prefer for sleeping, and some puffy king-sized ones made from a honeycomb foam that I use when reading in bed. I tossed the big one on my side to the floor.

“Choose whichever you like” I said. “I prefer to sleep on the hard thin one because I’m a hard thin man.”
“Mmm…” she said. “I think I’ll take this big squishy one…”

She trailed off, leaving the thought uncompleted. I grinned and poked her in the stomach. “You’re not that squishy.”

She went to the bathroom, and when she returned started getting dressed with the abrupt motions of a woman scorned.

“Are you going?”
“Yes.”
“Because I called you ‘squishy’?”
“Yes.”

There were tears in her eyes. I pulled her back onto the bed, and held her.

“I’m sorry.” I said. “It was just a joke… and I didn’t actually call you ‘squishy’… I sorta said you weren’t squishy.”

I felt her begin to relent.

“I’m sorry” I said.
“I’m sorry” she said.

We held each other a while longer, before she began a monologue.

“You remember the other night we when were in bed, you were saying such nice things about how beautiful I was… I don’t think anyone has ever said something so nice to me, but the next day all I could think about was the other side of it, how you didn’t think I realised it, and it just really upset me, thinking that that must be the way I present myself.”

I deflected. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was just pillow talk.” The look in her eyes said that hurt her even more.

The next morning I walked her to the station, and once she was gone I mulled the situation over. My instinct was to end it; to send her some text saying I’d had fun but it wasn’t going to work, and quietly block her number. But this was the new Groom. Love is about tolerance. The girl was probably a bit thin skinned for a vicious predator like me, and tears on the third date are never a good sign, but I did like her. She was sweet, and smart, and funny, and had a bit of a flair that set her apart from all the other fans of wine and adventures. And I had meant what I said: her nose was a bit big, and her hips a bit too good for child bearing, but her eyes were bright and clear and she was beautiful. “This is the one, Groom” I said to myself. “Love is a many faceted stone, made perfect by its flaws.” I can make this work.

But the Groom of the past had other ideas.

Later that day, she sent me a text:

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”
“I’ve been thinking about you too.”
“I read your blog…”

Not one to be provoked by a hanging ellipsis, I left her text unanswered. There was no need. I knew it was over.

Some hours later she got tired of waiting and confirmed it.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore. I don’t want to wind up as just another one of your stories.”

Cohiba Siglo II, final third.

The Siglo II ends mostly with fairly clean tobacco and dry grass; there is nothing too revelatory about it, but it is smooth and delicious and a first-class smoke in every way. I’ve been smoking alongside Davidé, and have made him a gift of a Siglo II to smoke alongside me. His tastes and budget run more often to White Owls than Cohiba, and he is rightly blown away by it. He declares it the best cigar he’s ever smoked. I hope that most of the aged and limited Cohibas that are to come resoundingly defeat the Siglo II, but it sets a high bar that few cigars from lesser marques would clear. If you need a perfect sized cigar for a daily smoke, and you have the means, you can’t do much better than a Siglo II.

Cohiba Siglo II. Finished.

Cohiba Siglo II on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo de San Juan

Hailing from 2014, the Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo de San Juan is a comparatively recent addition to the Serie Le Hoyo family of cigars. As such, it naturally has a 54 ring and a double-sized band. Like all cigars this heavy, it feels overweight both in the hand and on the lips. The unfired draw is a touch looser than Cuban, but acceptable. My luck with the Serie Le Hoyo line having being somewhat better than with the Epicures, I have some hopes for this one.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo de San Juan unlit

Once lit, it begins delicately, with some sweet dessert spice behind the typical cedar. Nutmeg, perhaps. Some vanilla.

After the US, Beatrice and I were friendly acquaintances. Once in a while she’d show up at some event, or come by the office to see her brother, and if she happened to pass me in the corridor she’d say “hi.” Our relationship stayed at this level for about six months, until on one of these encounters she mentioned that she was looking for a job, and as it happened, I could get her one.

We had a need in my business for someone to call beauty salons and book appointments for people. It was a pretty thankless task. There were no set hours, and you could do it from anywhere you wanted, but basically when someone filled in a form on a website wanting to book in a treatment, the faceless machine would ping your phone and had to call all the parties involved and arrange the details, ideally within about half an hour. Payment was based on the number of bookings you organised. At the time Beatrice enquired, the role belonged to a Taiwanese boy who fitted it in around his life as a professional online poker player. He had gotten the job via a pretty similar mechanism to Beatrice: he was some guanxi connection of my colleagues in the senior management. By all accounts he was fucking it up. His English was broken, and his male voice creeped out the women who were booking bikini waxes. Over the next week or so I made a point of highlighting it on the corporate communications channel whenever he missed a booking, and made the case for Beatrice to whoever would listen. Within a fortnight she had the job.

She worked from home, but over the next few months I made a point of making sure she was included whenever there was a team meeting or bonding exercise or other excuse to have her into the office. I wasn’t motivated by my attraction to her per-se – certainly I thought she was attractive, but at fourteen years my junior she seemed of a different species entirely to myself, and I never countenanced the idea that something might happen between us. I did like her though. She was fun to have around, and she seemed to appreciate the invites.

After a while the spring came. A few nights a week Thadd and I and some others would head out to the terrace in the evenings to drink beer and smoke joints, and more often than not Beatrice would join us. Sometimes we’d drink late into the night, and sometimes we’d go out afterwards. One Friday a few of us headed out to dinner, and then a pub, and by the time ten o’clock came around, the last standing were Thadd, Beatrice and I. Thadd bottomed his drink and announced his departure, clearly expecting the party to disband with him, but instead Beatrice looked at me. “I’m up for one more. You want to stick around?”
“Sure.”

One more turned into three more. The pub closed, and we headed to a little cocktail bar I knew from my years of Saturdays. The bartender welcomed me by name, and he shook my hand as he showed us to the best seats in the house. Perhaps it was the booze, but somehow my rotted brain failed to make the connection that I was in; that this nymphet, this Helen of Troy in a see-through top, who could have any man she wanted, had wanted spent five hours of her Friday night sitting close with me and laughing at my jokes. She was attracted to me. When the bar closed and I had thrown down my platinum card, and we had stumbled out into the alleyway, I was actually surprised to find her arms around my neck, and her lips ravenous on mine.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo de San Juan somewhat burnt

With about two thirds still unsmoked, the cigar remains a Hoyo. While the dessert spices have faded, the wood has intensified, and there’s now a touch of chemical tang; the sharp musk of a cockroach in its death throes. I’ve been smoking this cigar while sipping on a sugary iced coffee, which I thought might have enough sweetness and palate cloying dairy to mask the Hoyo’s lesser qualities, but it appears not to be so. Cedar sap. Tastes like a sawmill.

The whole affair lasted about six weeks, I suppose. At work it was a big secret. Beatrice would come to the after-work drinks, and we’d sit and converse like any other colleagues, except with ankles quietly linking underneath the table, and her fingers running stealthily across my lap while she pretended to look for something in her bag. She liked to give me hickeys, great welts on my arms and neck, and then in the break room would coyly ask where I got the bruise. Abusing my admin privileges, I created a private channel on the intraoffice chat, and we were on it constantly. It was a stressful time for me at work. I was deeply engaged in a power struggle with another manager, who eventually would go over my head with the principal complaint that I never did any work. In that era, she wasn’t wrong. All I did was chat to Beatrice.

The protestation from the December side of every May-December relationship is the same: “she makes me feel young.” It’s not inaccurate. Dating in your 30s is very transactional; there’s a sense that the music is starting to slow, and if we don’t all find a chair soon then we’ll be left forever standing. Everyone has a life behind them, with secrets to hide. You need to assess your partners quickly, and decide which compromises you’re willing to accept.

With Beatrice I felt like a teenager again. The last moment before I closed my eyes, I would text her “goodnight,” and the first thing I would do when I opened them again was check to see if she’d replied. During the day she never left my thoughts for more than five minutes. I had an energy I hadn’t felt in years.

Much as teens find it sufficient to spend a day loitering in parking lot, so we never felt the need to do anything much. We’d spend whole day together in bed, holding each other, love making interspersed with TV and chit chat and perhaps ordering in a pizza. On paper the sex wasn’t much; I was old and impotent, and filled with hang-ups, and she was shy and too beautiful to do any work. The reality of it was the best I’ve ever had. We’d lie there, legs entwined, her body supple and warm, melting into mine like a puzzle piece. She would nuzzle me with her button nose, and squirm with ticklish delight when I kissed her neck. Once in a while I’d get up to go to the bathroom, and the sight of her in repose on my bed would take my breath away. Long and lean, her strawberry hair unfurled on my pillow, she naturally hairless from the eyebrows down, with not scar nor a pimple nor a wrinkle nor a fold anywhere on this Venus’ alabaster body.

Even apart we were teens, staying up late watching early episodes of The Simpsons together in different homes and chatting about it online. “Lol” I’d type, at some joke about the Gulf War. “?” she’d text back. “Was that a joke? Who’s Norman Schwarzkopf?”

A few weeks into our relationship, the HR head pulled me aside after one of our regular team catch-ups. “Hey, just thought I should let you know because you’re friends with her brother – we’re going to let Beatrice go. She’s been letting half her bookings slip through.” I mounted as vigorous defence of her as I could, but he just shrugged his shoulders. “Take it up with Steph, she’s her manager.”

Back at my desk I checked the numbers. She wasn’t wrong. Beatrice had been missing a lot of bookings. I thought back to the weekend when, luxuriating in bed with me her phone had beeped. She glanced at it and ignored it. “Just stupid work.” Abusing my admin privileges yet again, I deleted a few posts, upping her percentage.

Over the next few weeks I waged a campaign of trying to point out Beatrice’s successes in public wherever possible. In private I was torn. I wanted nothing on earth more than to tell her everything, but it seemed like that would be crossing a line in our already dubious relationship. Instead I resorted to hints, which ended disastrously with a poorly timed joke. It was the end of a long day in bed, and we were watching Black Mirror, an episode where people are served by a digital version of themselves, trapped inside a computer. “That’d be so nice” Beatrice purred, her head nuzzled in my neck. “Well it wouldn’t work out well for you” I cracked. “Your assistant would be so lazy.”

She was furious, and stormed out, and was still giving me the silent treatment that Tuesday, when I left for a business trip. By the Thursday she had forgiven me enough to send me a panicked text. “OMG. HR wants to meet with me tomorrow! Am I fired?”

I tried to be as nice about it as I could, to say it wasn’t her fault, that she was great, but I told her what I knew to be true, that yes, she was fired. The next day she was mad again. “Why did you tell me that?” she said. “I’m not fired! I got promoted! I’m going to be working in the office now!”

That afternoon in Sydney I had lunch with Steph, Beatrice’s manager, and things became clearer. Steph had always been a provocateur. She was everyone’s best friend to their face, but lethal behind their backs. She had gone after me numerous times, for crimes both real and imagined, but I was far too well ensconced for it to make much of a difference. The real victims were always those who reported to her. “Did you here they promoted Beatrice?” She raged. “I can’t believe it! She’s lazy, she’s incompetent! I have to clean up her messes all the fucking time. I’ve been saying they should fire her for months, but they promoted her! They said they looked at her numbers and they weren’t that bad, but it’s fucking bullshit, I know she’s missed heaps.”

The next day, back in Melbourne, Beatrice texted me. “Come to Thadd’s party today.” She said “I miss you.”

When I showed up she was there on the lawn, sitting with her brother. “I can’t believe you told her she was going to get fired” was the first thing Thadd said. “Yeah,” I joked “well, she was… you should be careful, B, you’ve got enemies.”

She was cold to me the rest of the afternoon, and when I got home I texted to ask her why. Yet again, she was furious. “I can’t believe you said I have enemies. Why would you undercut me like that?” I tried to explain, to plead my innocence, but to no avail. We were through.

And so, for the next few months I would see her nearly daily, close but so far out of reach. She would flit past my desk, a flash of red in my peripheral, her head turned firmly away, or I would catch the scent that once lingered on my sheets in an elevator she had recently departed. Whenever conversation was unavoidable, when we found ourselves in the same circle at Friday Drinks, she would miss no opportunity to take shots at me, quibbling with anything I said. A few months later her name came up again as a prospective layoff, and this time I said nothing.

And then came the final curtain of any teenage relationship. It was her birthday. 21. Our time together had been short, and by then was long past, but I still remembered the date. I went to message her, a warm wish for old time’s sake, and there it was: this user has unfriended you and blocked you from sending messages.

In the final inch-and-a-half of the Serie le Hoyo, I catch myself leaning back to exhale a luxuriant cloud of smoke, and it suddenly dawns on me that the cigar has come alive. There is a lot of Islay whisky in here; it is an Islay Whiskey aged in cedar barrels, certainly, but there is also a pleasant smoky peat, and some nice caramel sweetness. It could be the iced coffee talking, but I think I might even detect a hint of cream in the aftertaste.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo de San Juan final third

As far as cigars go, this one is still a Hoyo, but unlike most Hoyos, it has a bit of energy. I attribute it mostly to its youth. It’s invigorating. Intoxicating. Sure, an older Hoyo might be a bit smoother, and it might have some imagined subtleties that this one lacks, but for me, I’ll take the young one any day. It belongs high up in the roster as far as Hoyos go.

Better than a dusty old Epicure No. 1, that’s for certain.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo de San Juan in ashes

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo de San Juan on the Cuban Cigar Website

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo des Dieux

Beyond the Epicures, there is another line in Hoyo de Monterrey: the Serie le Hoyo. A reader, distressed by the perpetual mediocrity that this season’s vertical has put me through, suggested that I should try something from the Le Hoyo range, and presented me with this example, a Le Hoyo des Dieux.

“Are you a big Hoyo fan?” I asked, worried that I may have offended a man of otherwise impeccable taste (and ready with my follow-up question, “how could anybody like this muck?”). “Not really,” he shrugged. “But I like the Des Dieux.”

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo des Dieux unlit

The cigar begins nicely enough, although it’s not as far from the Hoyo trope as I would like. It’s mild, with that woody, cedar taste, and a very strong grass note. Beneath it all there is something lactic, which in and of itself is a big improvement over the rest of the Hoyo marque.

We are drinking that prince of drinks, the Sazerac. It’s a drink I’ve been ordering once in a while for many years. In the early 2000s, before Mad Men re-popularized vintage alcoholism, and before I was really secure in my masculinity, ordering cocktails was a dangerous affair. It was the dying days of the liqueur era, and all around was saccharine sweet; every drink on every menu made of Galliano, Chambord and Frangelico, served in a hurricane glass with fruit and whipped cream spilling out of the top.

Once, seeing me agonizing over a particularly treacherous menu, a bartender offered to make me a special, and the thing that came back was a Sazerac. I didn’t care much for it, my boyish palate still too soft for hard liquor, but I persisted, and have ordered them occasionally ever since. A safe choice. Slightly watered down, lightly sweetened whiskey. Something every bartender knows that sounds a bit more sophisticated than an Old Fashioned when you ask for it.

It was more or less a year ago to the day that my host showed me the true potential of the Sazerac. When he makes them they are smooth and sweet, with only the slightest twinge of alcohol burn. Beyond all else there is a butteriness to them; they warm the throat like an alcoholic Butter Menthol. Divine. A prince among drinks.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo des Dieux, somewhat burnt

By about the midpoint, the lactation has increased to the point where cream is the dominant flavour in the cigar. There is still some wood on the back end (it is a Hoyo, after all), but mostly it is cream. The tobacco taste is very light, with not a hint of spice or bitterness.

The first step to making a good Sazerac is to select the right glass: you want to contain the volume of the drink (about 75ml) and nothing more. This is no place for a balloon glass.

Next, pour in a little absinth. 5, maybe 10ml. You want an absinth with some staying power. My host uses Doubs, but anything a bit serious will do. Not Green Fairy.

Fill the glass to the brim with water and set it in the freezer for 45 minutes. For this reason alone, a Sazerac is good for the first drink of the night. Have the glasses in the freezer so that they’re ready to go as soon as she walks in the door. After 45 minutes, the glass will have the start of a thin skin of ice. Serve only to punctual guests. If she’s an hour and a half late then you’ll have to wait until the absinth ice-cubes at least partially thaw.

(The object of all this is to chill the glass and to coat the inside evenly with a light amount of the absinth. The hurried tapster could theoretically get away with leaving the glass only a few minutes, or perhaps not chilling it at all. As in all things though, if you can take the time, you should.)

When the glasses are about chilled, make the bulk of the drink. In a cocktail tin, mix two shots of good cognac, with 10ml of simple syrup and three dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters. When it comes down to it, this drink is basically a glass of cognac, so you should use something drinkable. My host uses Hennessey VSOP. In many bars, they use one part of rye whiskey to one part cognac. This is one of the many reasons most bartenders fail at this drink.

The most important step is the stirring. Add to your tin a few large lumps of ice. Large lumps melt slower and are more forgiving. Stir the drink with a bar spoon until it is exactly as cold and diluted as it needs to be. How to tell when that is? Well, therein lies the skill of the Sazerac; the thing that sets it apart from the Old Fashioned or the Alaska or any other glass of lightly sweetened hard liquor. For me, it is always about ten turns of the spoon longer than I think it should be. Stir too little and your Sazerac will still have the alcohol burn. Still too much and it will taste watery.

With the drink ready to go, take the glasses out of the freezer, and toss the contents dramatically down the sink. Hold one glass under her nose. She’ll wrinkle it. “Black jellybeans?”

Strain the tin into the glasses, filling a bare half millimetre below the rim. The drink will be a glorious Chuck Berry red. Drop a lightly coiled lemon twist into each glass. The liquid should now be forming a meniscus. Take a second piece of lemon peel and squeeze some of its oils over the surface of the drink. Spritz a little more on the outside of the glass, where the hand will sit. On the stem if you’re using stemware.

Serve carefully and drink with purpose.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo des Dieux, mostly combusted

The Le Hoyo des Dieux ends very respectably, with a slight strengthening of the tobacco note, but no tar or anything objectionable. Perhaps it’s the liquor, or the company, or the warm summer sun, but the Dieux has been a very pleasant smoke. It is a Hoyo, and it has all the family traits. It’s light and woody and not overly complex. What is there is good, however, and I rank it above all its predecessors in the round-up.

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo des Dieux nub

Hoyo de Monterrey Le Hoyo des Dieux on the Cuban Cigar Website

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

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2

Your intrepid reporter is deep in the jungles of Northern Australia, where the white noise of the cicadas is loud enough to make conversation difficult. My hostel has the aspect of a safari lodge: the bar is a few roughhewn wooden benches under a great green tarpaulin, strung between three ancient trees. My fellow travellers all speak with different accents, none of them Australian.

The place bills itself as a ‘wilderness retreat.’ My room, some fifty meters away down a narrow path through the dense foliage, is a meagre hut, with flyscreen walls and a tarpaulin roof. There is no power after they shut the generator off at 10pm. We are several hours north of the nearest mobile phone coverage, and there is a sign by the bar that gently advises us not to bother enquiring about the WiFi: “The best connection you can make” it suggests, “is with each other.”

I feel like there is no better way to bond with my compatriots than by lighting up a cigar: after all, what could a bunch of eco-tourists possibly object to about a Cuban cigar, the most natural product on earth?

Like its thinner sister, the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 is an ancient cigar, having survived since the revolution. Once upon a simpler time, these came in cabinets of 50, and wore no bands. Since 2008 they have two, giving this example less age than that. It is the oldest of the still extant robustos, an early forebear of the fat-cigar trend.

As an accompaniment, I order a glass of the highest shelf local spirit in the house: Bundaberg Black, neat. The bartender makes a show of carefully measuring out the shot. “You don’t want me to give you too much of this stuff, mate.”

He’s not wrong. Pure gasoline.

 Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 unlit, on a glass of Bundy Black.

Set ablaze, the cigar opens in a pleasant but inoffensive manner. The predominate flavour is mid-strength tobacco, tending towards mild. It is grassy, with strong notes of hay, accompanied by saddle leather and a hint of wet animal, to complete the barnyard melange.

I arrived in the jungle yesterday, and slept only fitfully: not only is there the constant cacophony of the cicadas, which only the mating calls of the bush turkeys and cassowaries can break through, but also every ten minutes a nut falls from the tree above my hut and lands on the tarpaulin like a gunshot. My wakeup-call this morning came in the form of a marsupial mouse, who crawled onto my pillow from places unknown. I was dozing when I felt his hot breath in my ear, and inquisitively rolled over to find us face to face. With a primal yawp I leapt out of bed, and he fled. Unable to locate either the point of the critter’s entry or of his exit, I decided the best strategy was to vacate the hut myself. On the porch I found a four-foot iguana, and I encouraged him inside to ferret out the rodent, but the slovenly lizard didn’t seem interested. 

By midday I found myself in the local swimming hole. Some kids were downstream of us, swinging off a rope, laughing, and cursing like sailors at their disobedient Blue Heeler, Gypsy. Eventually they left, with most of them roaring off in their beaten up four-wheel drive. One of their number, however, came towards us to collect his things – a towel and a short digeridoo – that lay on the river bank near where we were swimming.

He was a lanky teen, with a pile of red hair. His skin was parchment white; his pants would have been a similar tone, but had been rendered transparent by the water, making the chestnut thatch of his mons pubis distractingly visible. He hailed us from the shore with a ponderous drawl of the Australian bush philosopher.

      “Youse from around here?”

I told him I was from Melbourne, and he sighed.

      “I don’t like the city” he told us. “I’m from the Daintree, born and raised for nineteen years. I went to Sydney once. I thought the jungle had made me a man, but that city made me a little boy.”

My companion is from California, and she told him so, and he seemed to like that a little better. “Yeah, I reckon that’d be alright. I reckon California would be like the Daintree.”

I laughed, and told him that I’d been to both, and they were similar. “Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere a little different though? See the world?”

      “Why would I ever want to go anywhere else, when it’s so beautiful here?”

I asked about his digeridoo. “Oh, I love me dige,” he told us. “Can I play you a tune?”

The lad was good, conjuring from the dige at least as tonal a sound as I’ve ever heard from one, with a syncopated section reminiscent of an electronic dance track. For his finale he plunged the end of the stick into the water of the creek, slowly pushing it deeper and deeper, muffling the sound, but creating a maelstrom of bubbles around it. Finally, he withdrew it, gasping for air.

      “I do that to improve my lungs” he told us. “If I could play my full size dige when it was all the way in the water like that, I’d have the strongest lungs in Australia.” 

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, two thirds remain. 

Just past the midway point the cigar starts to get bitter and ashy, but is somewhat redeemed by a very mild sweetness on the aftertaste. The flavours, in the rare place where anything definable penetrates the bitterness, are much unchanged: tobacco and dry grass. Some cedar.

Without warning the heavens open, a torrential downpour that pounds on the tarpaulin roof, competing with the white noise of the jungle. The low-point of the roof is nearby, forming a spout where the rain cascades off like a waterfall. A fast-flowing creek immediately forms on the ground beneath, disappearing off into the bush. Toads emerge, seemingly from nowhere, splashing about on the riverbank.

Within fifteen minutes it is over, and the air returns to its regular warm and humid state. The bush turkeys resume their cries.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, smoked to just above the bands.

The final inch of the cigar reveals the life in the thing. The tobacco grows from medium toward strong. The sharp bitterness is gone, replaced by the richer, and much more pleasant bitterness of heavy tar, with nuttiness (peanuts), and some tropical fruit notes in the back of the thing.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 is not a terrible cigar by any means, but nor is there especially much too it. I’d take it before the Epicure No. 1, but it still runs a distant second to Partagás Serie D No. 4.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 nub.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2 on the Cuban Cigar Website

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1

The passage of time, my friends, is inevitable. Grains of sand, crushed from once mighty mountains, cannot help but fall through the neck of the hourglass; the quartz crystal inevitably resonates with precise frequency when an electrical current is supplied; and my own Omega Seamaster’s mainspring coils and uncoils with much the same rhythm today as it did when my grandfather first wore it in 1969. Eighteen months have passed since we last spoke. Battles have been won and lost. Loves have come and gone. And Dusky Beauties, has returned.

Hoyo de Monterrey is the least of the big five global brands, and it’s not one I have terribly much affection for. The name translates to “the Hole of Monterrey,” and refers to a valley in Cuba, once famous for its tobacco. They are generally mild cigars, with a bit of wood and grass. The single example to appear previously on The Harem was 2003’s Extravaganza, smoked as part of my Colección Habanos roundup. It came in a mediocre 7th out of 10.

For the quintessential, entry level Hoyo, to which I shall compare all the exotics, I have selected the Epicure No. 1. It’s a corona gorda, and is as popular as any Hoyo. Normally they wear a second band, but mine has lost hers, a tithe to the god of plain packaging.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 unlit and in the shadows.

I light it, and the early notes are of mid-strength, vaguely sour tobacco. Somewhere in there there is a slight note of something chemical. It doesn’t overwhelm: just a little hint of Cuaba coming through. The aftertaste is quite pleasant. Buttery.

December 6th 2016 began like most days. I woke up late, and had a leisurely shower. I did a few push-ups, and drank my nutrient slurry, and by mid-morning had wandered into the office, where I noticed that my email wasn’t working. This in itself was not entirely unusual. Since some time in the early 2000s I have run my own email server, and from time to time, things happen. Most usually, the hard disk on the server fills up, and manual intervention is needed to clear things out, but occasionally the hosting company goes down for maintenance or something along those lines. I tried to log into the server, but it wasn’t responding, so I went to the Hotmail account that I use when other emails fail to see if they had sent me a downtime notice or anything. There was an email there, and it was brief and to the point.

Dear Mr. Groom,

Earlier today the server hosting your VPS crashed, and the backup could not be recovered. It has been reset. You will be refunded for downtime (approximately 8 hours) on a prorata basis.

They provided a new username and password, and when I logged in it was as they had described. The server was as a new, virgin install. CubanCigarWebsite, with its 40 gigabytes of files, was erased, along with all 125,000 words of Dusky Beauties, my personal website, the website I had in high-school, the site where I posted my erotic fiction in the early 2000s, my cocktail recipe database, my Michael Jackson fan site, the website for my friend’s home portraiture business: all were gone. My four email servers, with 10 years of correspondence, both private and professional, erased. It amounted to the complete annihilation of my lifetime creative output.

Denial, as always, was my first response. Computer data is rarely ever completely lost. In the very worst case, if even a portion of a disk drive survives, it can be picked over by men in white coats with microscopes. There was no indication that the loss was caused by a fire at the data-centre, so most likely it could be recovered with considerably less effort than that. I fired off a help desk ticket: priority 1, urgent. It would be the first of many. Their reply was similar to their original email: apologetic but nonchalant, and absolutely clear that the data would not be coming back. I fired off an increasingly panicked response, but my hope was starting to fade. It felt like it was time to call Trevor.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 in the bright sun, a quarter smoked.

At the midpoint the cigar is light-to-mid strength, with dry straw alongside freshly cut lumbar. There is a bit of a herbal taste there that leaves a tang on the back of the tongue.

In 2008 I was a bare neophyte in the world of Cuban cigars, when I found myself in a blind tasting contest. I had no business being there, as my experience was far too narrow, and I knew that whatever I picked was going to be a guess, but I wanted to at least make it an educated guess. I headed to CubanCigarWebsite.com, which was then (as now), the best online reference for Cuban cigars. The site at that time was flat HTML. Each cigar appeared in several locations that would all have to be updated manually, and most importantly, it wasn’t searchable. If you had the approximate dimensions of a cigar, and wanted everything that fit within that, it just wasn’t possible.

And so I emailed Trevor, the proprietor, and suggested that he put a database behind the site. In not so many words he replied: “good idea. Why don’t you do it.”

And so I did.

For the next four years we worked on the site together, our relationship pretty similar to your standard consulting gig. Once in a while Trev would have an idea for a change, and I would implement it. Every now and again he’d send a few cigars my way. It was at least three years and 150,000 words of emails before we ever met in person.

Between 2012 and 2014 Trevor gradually retired to a quiet life of philately, and I took over the running of the thing. I have changed very little during my tenure, beyond keeping it up to date and adding the odd technical feature. The truth is that by the time of Trev’s retirement, the site was basically complete, and could remain forever as a legacy to his efforts. Cuban cigar smoking is not a field that has changed terribly much over the last 500 years. Every year some more special releases come out, and once every 20 years or so there is an event of historical significance, but other than that, there isn’t a lot of innovation: most of the time, you still light them at the foot and puff from head.

It was not an easy call to make. Once I’d passed on the news that everything was gone, and unlikely to be recovered, Trev and I tried to make small talk, but we were both too shaken up to think of anything to say. All in all the call lasted about three minutes.

Later that night I went to a concert with an old friend. When she asked me how my day was I told her that I’d lost everything I’d ever created in my life. She asked how I felt. “Empty.” I replied.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 final third.

Into the final third, and the cigar is much unchanged: grass and sap, with a woody element and the strongly tannic tang of tang of cheap sauv blanc. It is starting to get bitter, which does not bode at all well for the smoke to come.

Like most things, it all worked out in the end. After I circulated an impassioned essay about the situation to the cigar community, there were a great many offers of assistance. My donation link saw more use than it had for the entirety of its existence. Technical experts had recovery advice. Lawyers were willing to send letters to the hosting company.

Most importantly, several people came forward offering me complete (if slightly out of date) copies of the site they had made “so they could browse it locally.” It was suspicious, but it saved me. Between February and April, I rewrote the backend software of the site, and then built a bot to repopulate it from the copies. Dusky Beauties was restored a little later, largely from caching sites and my own archives. My email was all still on my computer, and I was smart enough to back it all up before it resynced with the new blank servers. Not everything was saved. My rants about the faculty at my high-school and clumsy erotica of my early 20s were lost to the dust of all things. But perhaps that is for the best.

The Epicure No. 1 ends better than expected, grassy and nutty, and with the bitterness lurking just out of the fore-palate, I never once feel the need to spit or take a sip of water. In the end, this is not an overly complex cigar, with no flavour ever really emerging that could overpower mid-tobacco and vague grassiness, and barely any change throughout its passage. I’d take a Monte 4 over this, and a PSD4, and even a Romeo Petit Coronas. Between this and the Upmann Petite Coronas there’s not a lot in it. Both are inoffensive but unremarkable. Pick whichever is closest.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 nub.

One final note: once removed, the band bears a size mark for a 50-52 ring cigar: curious on a 46-ring gage smoke. I guess they were out that day.

Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 1 on the Cuban Cigar Website.

Cohiba Espléndidos

I have found myself at a young people’s party – a twenty-second birthday, no less. The birthday boy is one of the young people from my office, and he was most emphatic that I come, and so here I am in his parent’s house, hovering awkwardly like a middle aged creep. The youth are different to how I remember them. The skirts are shorter, for one.

The biggest shock at this party is that people are smoking, and smoking indoors, a habit I thought disappeared with the generation before mine. I consider, for a moment, lighting up one of the cigars that is in my pocket, but dismiss the idea as far too obnoxious, until the birthday boy wanders over with a tin of Wee Willem cigarillos. “Hey man, you want a cigar?” he asks. “I know they’re probably not as your usual thing, I tried to get some real ones but I couldn’t find any.” On the spur of the moment I offer him a deal. “Son,” I say, proffering the contents of my jacket pocket. “This is a Cohiba Espléndidos. This is Saddam Hussein’s favourite cigar. It is as good a cigar as you can smoke in life.  I’ll give you one, on condition that I can smoke the other in your house. Some of your guests are going to complain. It’s going to stink up your parent’s curtains. You’re going to get into trouble. I don’t recommend you take this deal.”

“Fuck yeah” he replies. “That cigar looks dope.”

The large cigar begins exceptionally smoothly; very light tobacco with umami mushroom notes, and miso soup, alongside the usual dry straw. It has a tighter draw, which for me is perfect, but I suspect might be a bit much for these twenty-two year olds. They seem to be enjoying it though. By the time my cigar has burnt through the first inch, theirs has passed through half-a-dozen pairs of lips and been featured in as many selfies.

Growing up as a nerd at an all-boys-school, I was seventeen before I attended my first real party: a party with girls and booze and dope and no adult supervision. A party where nobody was playing video games, and nobody got picked up by their parents at 10:30. A party with strangers. Alistair, who went to a different all-boys-school than I and who I knew vaguely socially, invited me. “You’re a classy guy, right? I’ve been seeing this girl, Jessica, and I want to take her to a party this weekend, but she’ll only come if she can bring her friend, so I need you to take care of the friend.”

Jessica, as it turned out, was stunning, and her friend Lauren not much her lesser, but the real eye opener was the party. It was like I had stepped into a different world. At the parties I usually went to we drank Coke and ate pizza and occasionally played laser tag. There were girls there, but they were pimply creatures with braces. These girls were another beast entirely. They wore makeup, and showed cleavage. One of them had her older sister’s ID, and bought us a bottle of Vodka and raspberry soda to mix it with. I watched awestruck as Jessica, a cigarette hanging from her lips, cut up a bowl of pot, casually sprayed it with fly spray to “make it burn better,” and rolled it into joints. When we smoked them I didn’t really feel anything, but I giggled along with the others.

Most miraculous of all was that the girls seemed to like me. I was as unique a butterfly to them as they were to me; they were used to suburban thugs, and here was a polite guy who didn’t just clown around with his mates and was amused by things other than his own flatulence. They listened in awe to my tales of boyhood in China and Papua New Guinea. As much as they were women to me, to them I was a man.

I had an ‘official’ girlfriend at the time, whom I held hands on the train in the morning and occasionally made out with in the park after school, but after the party she seemed like an artefact of a bygone era. I broke up with her over the phone, and started getting on at a different carriage.

I started hanging out with my new crew almost every weekend, drinking and smoking and loitering in the way teenagers do. I started dating Lauren, more or less by default, but as the months went by I started to wonder if I hadn’t made the wrong choice. Jessica was not only hotter, but she was funnier, and maybe even a little smarter. It turned out that Alistair had misrepresented their relationship as well. He was obsessed with her, certainly, and wanted to date her, but she was very clear on the matter: she wasn’t interested in him.

Cohiba Espléndidos with about an inch smoked

By the midpoint of the Espléndidos the saltiness is gone, replaced by a sweet caramel vanilla bean. The grassiness remains. The tobacco is still extremely light – this cigar is approximately the same age as the Lanceros I smoked recently, and yet, somehow, this thicker cigar has even more delicate a flavour profile. The birthday boy’s cigar seems to have mainly been commandeered by one of the female guests, who is standing on the edge of the dancefloor, sipping from it blissfully. I don’t ask her for her tasting notes. One of the dancers glares at her, and makes a big show of fanning the smoke away. To another guest I observe that the end of the cigar looks very dry – usually when a cigar is passed around a party like this it ends up as a chewed up, soggy mess. “Well, a lot of the people here have very well practiced joint etiquette.”

Lauren’s chief appeal was in her glorious mane of strawberry blonde hair, so when, six months into our relationship, she dyed it the awful matt black of moody teenagers, I took the opportunity and broke up with her. For a time I was cast out of the group. Lauren and Jessica were best friends, and inseparable, but then I made my big play. I asked Jessica to come to the school formal with me. It was two months hence: a night of dinner and dancing. My first tuxedo. I would pay for her ticket and promised her a limo and a corsage. The after-party was to be a warehouse rave with unlimited alcohol. She said yes, and Lauren, the previous presumptive holder of my plus one, was furious. The girls stopped talking, and with Alastair out of the picture thanks to his rebuffed affections, Jessica and I became thick as thieves. My plan was working perfectly. At the after party, I would make her mine.

In retrospect I should have made a move on her in those two months we were best friends. She was clearly open to it. Once, when we were alone in her room she asked me why I had chosen Lauren over her the night we’d first met, and when I explained that Alistair had misled me about their relationship she laughed. “You could have had any girl at that party, you know? We were all so into you.” I should have kissed her right then, but fool that I was I stuck to my plan. I would make my big move at the formal after party. It was going to be perfect.

I thought I should introduce Jessica to some of my school friends before the big event, so the week before the formal I took her to a party of my own. It was wilder than most of our affairs – Simon Treehorn was the host, and his parents mostly left us alone in the rumpus room out back. A few people even snuck in beers. I was very clear to my friends before the event that this girl was mine, and I could see by their expressions when she walked in in her tight jeans and a low cut tank that they were impressed. For most of the night I sat with her on the couch. Most of the action at the party was centred around the Nintendo or the pool table, and the couch was off to the side, a bit above those childish pursuits. At some point I went to the bathroom, and when I came back Owen Donoghue had taken my spot, and was chatting to her. I made a show of nonchalantly watching the Nintendo game, while keeping a careful eye on the couch, where they seemed to be getting on awfully well. Within an hour they were making-out. As I watched them, my fists balled in impotent rage, I realised my mistake. I had introduced a girl who liked me to a bunch of guys who were exactly the same as I was.

She came to the formal wearing my corsage, but she was really Owen’s date. She was seated next to me for dinner, but never stopped making eyes at him. I made a point of taking her to dance, but as soon as a slow song came on he wandered over. “Mind if I cut in.” At the after party I watched in misery as they made-out and dry-humped in the corner, somehow not able to look away.

There are two things you have to know in life if you want to get the girl: never hesitate and never listen to your friends when they tell you to back off.

Cohiba Espléndidos final third

As you’d expect from a cigar this size, the Espléndidos gets earthy toward the end, with notes of ash and wildfire, and medium-strong tobacco. There is a mild sting from the tar, but it’s nothing a sip of beer can’t placate. Burn has been razor sharp the entire way. I observe the discarded nub of the other cigar in an ashtray, consumed to just above the band. Personally, I like to take my cigars until I burn my fingers, but five and a half inches is not a bad effort for a bunch of novice smokers.

If I have any minor criticism of this cigar, it’s that it was almost too smooth: there was a bit of a lack of flavour. Compared against the Lanceros, both are elegant, delicious cigars, but the Lanceros has a touch more complexity, and I’d take one of those over the Espy for that reason. Still a great cigar though.

Cohiba Espléndidos nub

Cohiba Espléndidos on the Cuban Cigar Website

Cohiba Lanceros

The Cohiba Lanceros. If you ask the head of Habanos SA what the flagship Cuban cigar is, he will probably tell you the BHK56, or maybe the Siglo VI; to me it will always be the Cohiba Lanceros. The legend goes that in 1963, Fidel Castro observed one of his bodyguards smoking a long, thin, elegant cigar (that the bodyguards of one of the most assassination liable people on earth got to lounge around smoking cigars in full view of their boss gives you a good image of how things went in early ‘60s Cuba). Intrigued by the shape he asked what it was, and the man told him it was one of his friend Eduardo’s custom rolls, and offered him one. Castro smoked it, loved it, and had Eduardo summoned and set up in El Laguito, a repossessed mansion in the suburbs, to roll the personal cigars of El Presidente. Eventually the cigars were named Cohiba, and were made available to well-connected party men, and given out as diplomatic gifts. In the 70s they were very occasionally sold to tourists on Cubana flights and, in 1984, they went on sale to the general public (Castro had quit smoking the year before, leading to a surplus in high end tobacco).

Cohiba Lanceros unlit

With a kiss from a jet lighter the cigar smoking begins. The first flavours are very crisp and light, with lactic, creamy notes and the tang of fresh cut grass. In the aftertaste there is an unmistakable honey sweetness. The tobacco is very light in the first few puffs, but a centimetre or so it thickens to medium. This particular Lanceros is from 2008. The ash is dirty grey, and doesn’t hold very well, flaking off with regularity. The draw and burn are perfect.

These days, I am well enough connected in the international community of cigar aficionados that I could probably get a tour of El Laguito if I were ever in Havana, but in 2006 it was not so. Back then, I was a cigar neophyte. I had smoked precisely one Cohiba, which was almost certainly a fake (a friend knew I had an interest in cigars, and brought me back a Cohiba from Mexico [never a good sign]. I smoked it in a storm water drain where I used to hang out sometimes [that’s another story]. As I recall it burned down the core the whole way – never having encountered this before, I didn’t know to fix it [slight touch of flame around the edge] and, assuming it was some kind of high end smokeless tobacco, let it go, noting that the flavour was “very smooth”). Somehow, however, I had heard of the old mansion, and while I was in Cuba I made a personal point of visiting.

It took a while to get the taxi driver to figure out where I wanted to go, but after I had tried the name in several different pronunciations, tried “Cohiba,” and “bueno tobacco fábrica,” and pulled out my guidebook for a map, we eventually had meeting of the minds. “Ah, El Laguito,” he cried delightedly. “La fábrica de tobacco Cohiba! Bueno!” and off we went.

Today El Laguito is a bit tarted up, with big Cohiba logos on the outside, but in 2006 it was a nondescript mansion in a leafy neighbourhood, with no indication at all that industry was taking place inside. A high fence surrounded it, and the only point of entry seemed to be via a ramshackle corrugated iron annex. Entering we found a group of women sitting around chatting. They were not accustomed to dealing with random gringo walk-ins, and after a bit of “bueno tobacco fábrica tour,they found someone with a little English. The newcomer told us that this was a factory, and to visit we would need permission from Tabacuba, the tobacco ministry. She drew us a map. As we walked out I remarked to my friend that we were the dumbest bastards in the world. It was the perfect opportunity to offer a 20CUC note and ask dumbly “¿permiso?”

Cohiba Lanceros with about two inches burnt

At the midpoint the Lanceros has mellowed, returning to very light. The predominant flavours are grass and straw, with a hint of the barnyard. In the aftertaste there are sweet fruit elements, a touch of citrus and raisins. The lactic cream has more or less vanished.

The Tabacuba office marked on the map was a few kilometres away, close to central Havana, but it was a nice day so we decided to walk it, taking in the shady streets of colonial mansions and embassies that surround El Laguito. We reached the office around 2:30pm, when the after lunch slump was definitely in effect. There was nobody in reception, but after ringing a bell we finally roused a security guide, who eventually conjured up an English speaker, who was very bemused that we might want to visit the legendary factory. “This is just a factory” he told us. “Not for tourists.” With a suspicious glare he lowered his voice. “You are journalists?” Knowing that journalists are not always looked upon kindly in Cuba, I assured him that we weren’t. Eventually he told us that he didn’t see an issue, but also that he couldn’t give us the permit here, and instead wrote down the name of a man to see at the Tabacuba office in Old Havana. He drew us a map.

The next office was closed by the time we got there (about 4:30pm), and I was preoccupied for the next few days with other tourist jaunts, but eventually returned, and presented the girl at the desk with the name of the man the clerk had written down for me. I waited for 30 minutes or so in a dingy waiting room, before eventually being ushered into a messy office. The man was very suspicious, asking me first if I was a journalist, and then listing off the names of publications he thought I might write for. After I refuted all of them he tried a different tact, and began listing tobacco companies. When that line of enquiry was exhausted he asked for my passport, and thoughtfully inspected every page, rubbing each stamp and visa between his thumb and forefinger, as if trying to establish whether or not my Japanese entry permit from two years earlier was a forgery.

Finally satisfied, he took my passport with him, and disappeared into another room for thirty minutes or so. From my seat my eyes searched around the room for the one-way mirror or concealed camera, sure I was being observed by the Cuban Secret Police. Eventually the bureaucrat returned, and presented me a long document in Spanish, with an official red stamp on it. “Your permission,” he told me. “You got to El Laguito on this date,” indicating a date about a month hence. “No, no” I said in dismay. “I’m leaving Cuba at the end of the week.” His patience for me exhausted, he shook his head. “This date is not negotiable.”

And so I left, and left Cuba, having never got further into El Laguito than the guardhouse. I did learn a lesson, however, one which would serve me well during my China years, and further travels: when dealing with a second world bureaucracy, as soon as things start to go against you: bribe everybody.

Cohiba Lanceros final third

As the Cohiba Lanceros reaches its final third it gets milder still, just the lightest of tobacco flavour, over a subtle coffee, leather, and a hint of new tennis balls. It is only once I have smoked past the band that it gets a little punchy, the ash causing me to salivate. I have brought down a bottle of the high end Bundaberg rum, but forgot to bring a glass, so haven’t touched it until now. The tar on my palate is unpleasant enough that I swig from the bottle to cut it. Like all Bundy it has a bit of a paint thinner taste to it, but it cuts the tar nicely.

Anyway, the Cohiba Lanceros is a fantastic, elegant and subtle cigar, that brings to mind a more civilized age. Smoke more Cohiba Lanceros.

Cohiba Lanceros nub

Cohiba Lanceros on the Cuban Cigar Website