Cigars et al.

Lightspeed ¶

A couple of years ago I started smoking cigars more often and they’ve turned out to be one of the genuinely enjoyable things in life - one of those small, civilised pleasures that makes the whole enterprise feel worth it.

That wasn’t always the case. I’d tried cigars when I was younger and they never really connected with me. At the time, the downsides - and yes, obviously there are downsides - didn’t seem worth it.

I’m outside right now, standing in the snow with a Liga Privada from Drew Estate after a busy, patriarch-style morning: sorting out family needs, doing the kindergarten run, getting groceries to the father-in-law through snow and ice, chopping firewood, then lifting and moving heavy objects. So now I’m out here in the cold, smashing one of these delicious, manageable 15-minute cigars.

That, really, is where I found the value of pure tobacco: in the middle of intense periods of activity that needed to be done and could not be outsourced. No one else is going to drop the kids off. No one else is going to deal with the father-in-law. No one else is going to chop my firewood. There isn’t a cavalry. The cavalry is never coming.

So it’s up to me, which is fine, I’ve gotten used to doing it.

And once it’s done, the cigar acts not just as a reward but as a forced slowdown. I have to be outside. I have to take it easy. I have to regulate my breathing, calm down and sit with the taste and the nicotine for at least twenty minutes. The necessary mechanics reinforces the point: having a smoke forces everything to slowdown, and it’s the only time things do slow down in my life. Case in point, days like today.

Youthful Folly ¶

The first time cigars really made sense to me wasn’t when I was younger. I had tried them at festivals and on some half-baked experimental evenings but they weren’t delivering.

Instead it was when I was older after long summer workdays, when I could sit outside in a chair in the setting sun and do absolutely nothing except breathe, smoke and stare at the sky for a bit. Forcibly calmed down. Forcibly placed outside. Regular, controlled breathing. And with the added bonus that the wife and kids would mostly leave me alone because I was sitting there stinking of tobacco.

That is the complete opposite of the life I’m usually living, which is full of interruptions, indoor air, logistics, people, noise and constant low-level demand with spikes of astonishing bullshit. Cigars cut across that creating a solid boundary.

After a while I ended up exploring them more seriously. In the chaos of day-to-day life, I needed something that would take the edge off mentally so that I could keep my productivity where it needed to be. Athletes have massages, ice baths, stretching, mobility work - all the things that let them absorb the strain of training. I needed something that would counteract the intensity of my days and the wear that puts on my nervous system.

Beer and alcohol did that well enough, but they came with obvious costs. Mainly calories, bloat and the general bluntness of alcohol as a tool. I’ve never had much trouble regulating myself with drink, so it wasn’t a dependency issue. I just didn’t want the extra calories and didn’t particularly want to feel puffy and dulled.

Additionally, I had tried a beer or two mid work - not computer based “work”, I’m talking welding, landscaping, physically moving work. Beer does not tolerate movement - if you want violent heartburn smash a single tinny and start moving some bricks. Seen as I don’t know what’s coming for me in the next few hours, if I’d need to drive, move heavy stuff, do something physical, etc - this puts beer out of the question unless it’s late.

So I looked around. Most of the alternatives were either pharmaceutical, New Age, illegal, or embarrassing. Often all four if you shop carefully enough. None of that appealed to me.

So I came back to tobacco.

Not cigarettes - cigarette smoke already tells you all the poisons inherit - but cigars and pipes seemed to offer something different. I did some reading, both modern media and actual papers and what became clear was that the risk profile is different from cigarettes. Not nonexistent but different. Some cases the claim was negligible. Cigars and pipe tobacco are almost universally simpler products than cigarettes: they’re only cured and fermented tobacco leaves, without the industrial cabinet additions cigarettes became famous for. Additionally cigar smoking isn’t inhaled, it sits in your mouth and swills around delivering nicotine via the gums and flesh in the mouth. no lungs involved.

I decided the risks were fine for me. I wanted the performance, the mental balance, the time out and the flavour and personal care. Booze out, baccy in, clean stuff only, no garbage.

The Payoff ¶

Cigars sit in a similar category to family and pets for me: not perfect or consequence-free, but one of the things that improves the shape of life and is almost always worth the cost.

Without them I wouldn’t have my evening sunset flavour bombs or my snowy little breathing sessions that divide one part of the day from another and put a clean break in the middle of a lot of nonsense.

Recommendations ¶

These days I smoke almost exclusively Drew Estate. It’s an American brand with wholly owned production in Nicaragua. I’ve found their stuff reliably excellent. I started with assorted packs and trial smokes and fairly quickly realised I didn’t care much for Cubans. I know that’s practically heresy in some circles, but I found them underwhelming compared to the richer, darker flavour I was getting from Nicaraguan cigars.

I really got pulled in by the Kentucky Fire Cured lineup - especially Fat Molly - which uses leaf cured over a wood fire and picks up that deep, smoky character. God damn it’s good. I like smoked meat, I like smoky whisky, I like cigars that taste like someone dried them

Size & Place ¶

I strongly prefer smaller cigars and cigarillos. I simply do not have the time for a 45-minute or one-hour smoke. The Churchill model of gently pottering about from dawn till dusk is all well and good if you’re retired or otherwise not needed by anyone. For me, 20 to 30 minutes is the realistic upper limit and even that can be optimistic.

That’s also because I only smoke outside. I don’t want tobacco smell in the house, in the car, around the kids, or hanging around everything else I do. I want a hard boundary: here is where I smoke; there is the rest of life. That separation matters.

The smaller formats help with that. They’re cheaper, faster and lower-commitment. If one burns badly or turns acidic, I haven’t wasted much money or time. If I need to abandon it halfway through because life intervenes, I’m not mourning the loss of some grand hand-rolled monument that was meant to occupy the next hour of my existence.

At around £3 apiece, these little cigars are also, for me, a better and often cheaper indulgence than beer. Even in places where alcohol is relatively cheap, I usually don’t want multiple beers. One or two is fine. But a cigar often fits the slot better: cleaner, calmer, no hangover.

In the UK I used to buy from CGars and James J. Fox. Both were excellent.

One other factor to this: my experience with cigar retail is retail at its best, there’s still some old-world charm to it. Good customer service, little notes in the box, occasional samples, recommendations that feel human rather than algorithmic - all of that goes a long way. It feels like retail from before everything got flattened into sterile logistics and fake friendliness.

In Poland I buy from cigarillo.pl and they’ve been solid as well, though I’ve known them for less time.

Pipes ¶

As for pipes: pipes are great. Pipe tobacco is cheaper than cigars, the flavour range is much broader and the whole thing is mechanically neat. You don’t have ash falling everywhere, you’re less likely to roast your fingers and the pipe itself does some of the work for you.

There is a learning curve, though. Packing a pipe properly takes practice and you still need to relight it now and then. Then again, cigars can be temperamental too, especially if they’re badly made.