Heard in the Humidor: For the week of January 21-25, 2008

Compared with the drumbeat of negative reporting about cigarettes, there’s increasing coverage – generally positive – about cigar retailers and their positive impact on their communities...

Los Angeles – Near St. Petersburg, Florida, Lou Search faced a vexing problem, according to the St. Petersburg Times: "His favorite cigar store was about to close. His idea of how to solve it: Buy the shop."

Search and his wife, Dotty, didn’t have a background in retailing or in cigars. "The only thing I knew," he told reporter Jodie Tillman, "was that I liked cigars."

No matter. Twenty years after he bought in, the Searches are still operating the small Tobacco Hut shop in a strip mall in New Port Richey, Florida. Dotty, who is 74, works the morning shift and Lou, now 80, works the afternoons. They’re the whole staff and have no plans to retire.

Lou kept his regular business – a pressure cleaning company – going for ten years before joining his wife in the shop. Today, he estimates they have a customer base of more than 1,000 and they sell pipes, about 150 different brands, shapes or sizes of cigars and they blend their own pipe tobaccos. A great story.

>> With the holiday season over, the folks at General Cigar aren’t wasting any time. They’re starting the new year with new cigars, including a seventh shape in the popular Punch Gran Puro line, made in Honduras, has been added, the Punch Gran Puro Sesenta. This is a 60-ring gauge cigar – "sesenta" means sixty – with a length of 6 1/4 inches. It’s shipping to stores soon and has a suggested retail price of $5.25 each.

Also from Honduras is an eighth shape in the Don Tomas Clasico brand, the Toro. It measures six inches by 54 ring and like the others in this line, is nicely priced at $4.30 each. Although not promoted as heavily as some of the General brands, the Don Tomas line is slowly regaining the favor it had with smokers prior to the Cigar Boom, when it was known as a zesty cigar with a lively flavor, offered at a very reasonable price.

La Gloria Cubana fans will be delighted to know that the Serie R Belicoso (5 3/4 x 56) will now be more widely and more consistently available, still at a suggested retail price of $6.50 each. A new value pack will be issued, offering for cigars for the price of three, in sizes of the Hoyo de Monterrey Dark Sumatra and new Hoyo de Tradicion blends. These are expected in stores in late February.

>> Havana cigars have been presented in boxes, tins, tubes and jars for decades, but one of the strangest containers of all showed up and drew lively interest on eBay earlier in January.

A so-called "branch of the tree cabinet" was up for auction, a format which has been out of production for nearly 30 years. The cabinet was a two-piece cylinder that held 25 cigars, in this case Sancho Panza Tronquitos, measuring 5 1/2 inches long and 42 ring gauge. The cylinder itself was lined with a cedar sheet, but the exterior was made of lacquered natural tree bark which was fashioned into a tubed shape. The finished product looked like a tree trunk with a branch cut off in the middle.

Following nationalization, at least three brands were offered using this "box." The most unusual was the Siboney brand, of which very little is known and was not even reported to be in production until 1988. Two other brands – Romeo y Julieta and Sancho Panza – also used the Branch of the Tree cabinet for one model of cigars. The Romeo y Julietas were known as "Arbolados" and the Sancho Panzas as "Tronquitos" and the latter was up for action. Both cigars were coronas (5 1/2 inches by 42 ring) and this format was produced until at least 1979, the last time it appeared in Havana cigar catalogs.

The Sancho Panza Tronquitos cabinet on auction was in good condition with the interior cedar sheet enclosed. It drew a total of nine bids and sold for a final price of $459.67, just a little less than the $502.00 the Siboney cabinet earned two years ago. Pretty good for some tree bark!

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Cigar Cyclopedia

1/22/08

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