Master Blenders Series: Neil Garcia of Jake Wyatt Cigars
From the infield to the tobacco field—the story of Neil Garcia and Jake Wyatt Cigars
Former MLB catcher Neil Garcia didn’t get into cigars until the tail end of his career. But it was that moment in Neil’s SoCal stomping grounds, rubbing elbows with a family-owned cigar shop—and surrounded by friends who shared his passion for premium cigars—that set him on a crash course with the tobacco industry and Jake Wyatt Cigars.
Initially collaborating with those friends and the shop on an exclusive cigar blend, Neil hopped onto a red-eye flight to the Dominican Republic. He was headed for the La Aurora factory where he’d meet Manuel Inoa—a mentor who would change his life forever.
“Manuel proceeded to go through this—and I'd never experienced something like this at that point—but a very in-depth from seed-to-shelf perspective, rather than from the shelf looking backwards, which had been my experience. And it was unbelievably fascinating. Long story short, I ended up down in the DR on that same red eye, I think 16 times over the next year.”
During those visits, Neil toured “all the factories” and ended up getting introduced to Joel Marrero, who’d become Jake Wyatt’s master blender. Neil filled in the rest of the blanks in a candid conversation.
An Exclusive Interview with Neil Garcia
CA: Who are your cigar mentors?
Neil: Manuel Inoa. He’s been with La Aurora for 20 years plus. He also introduced us to who would become our master blender. Also a gentleman named Joel Marrero, hell of a good guy. He's been my partner at the factory now ever since, and we've done a lot of good stuff since then.
CA: Do you have other mentors outside the cigar industry?
Neil: My mentor, who actually just passed away last year (2024), in many ways in life, but especially in sports. Harry Schneider. He was beyond a father figure to me, and he impacted my life like you wouldn't believe. [Harry] was a big proponent as a coach and just became a dear friend and very much a father figure in my life. That all started with him, and there was a principle out of an old English philosopher named Herbert Spencer that he introduced us to. We named our San Andreas in the Gourmet Collection after him. And Spencer had a famous quote, "Nothing will keep a man in everlasting ignorance, and that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” Basically, in a nutshell, ‘Don't knock it ‘til you try it.’
Jake Wyatt Gourmet Collection Cigar Sampler
CA: We find that fascinating, because that just gave rise to, or at least put some explanation behind the inspiration behind one of your blends. What can you tell us about some of the others?
Neil: That Herbert Spencer quote was found in the back of his book called Appendix II, and Appendix II is the name of our Connecticut. If you're fortunate enough, you enter the zone,’-- you'll get hot. In baseball you’ll get hot as a firecracker in no time and you honestly think it'll last forever. You’ve got 30 at bats in a week if you go 20 for 30, you’ll think you're on top of the world. And then you can go 0 for 30 in a heartbeat, and the question would be—how do you handle those times?
I don't know if you guys play golf, or whatever hobbies you have--could be shooting, sports, could be anything--and when you get in those moments you play mental ping-pong, I mean, you make sure you put your shoes on the same way, you brush your teeth the same way, you eat the same breakfast…it is crazy, and when that happens, you enter this fourth dimension place—if you will—we all exist on this third dimensional plane, but when you have the privilege to [get in the zone], you'll enter this fourth dimension. And how long can you ride that? Hence our original blend, which is the Fourth Dimension, the Habano in our Gourmet Collection.
And Harry used to tell me, “Every now and then you're fortunate to tap into this unsuspected inner resource, and when you do, you hold on to it like you caught a bolt of lightning, just don't let that sucker go and ride it as long as you can.” That became our U.S.I.R. (an acronym for ‘unsuspected inner resource), the final cigar in our Gourmet Collection. And then, our Lucid Interval, because you go through these moments, man, and it doesn't feel like it's going to end.
CA: For the Connoisseur Series, I think everyone knows the story of Icarus. But what about Lithium and Maverick? Channeling your inner Nirvana? Or Goose?
Neil: Again, it's probably from my baseball background, from the standpoint you fail more than you succeed, and I want to know how to continually improve, right? “Yesterday's hits don't count in today's ballgame”, so to speak, which is a good ol' Willie Mays quote. The Gourmet Collection did very well for us. Much, much further, farther beyond anything I could have imagined. Some of the feedback we got was, people wanted something with more strength. That hint prompted us to launch the Connoisseur Collection.
Jake Wyatt Connoisseur Collection Sampler
It started with Lithium. All Latin American countries have very lithium-based soil. And traditionally, lithium as an element is a mood relaxer. That's why cigars have such a relaxation aspect. Hopefully, and very few of us do these days, you put your phone down, have a conversation and enjoy a cigar, right?
CA: Sure is cheaper than therapy.
Neil: Yeah (laughs). For us, [Lithium] was a fun project because we were working with and developed with them the hybrid tobacco called T-13 out of the Dominican. That is the main component in that filler, it's got a Corojo binder and it's probably the most complex cigar in our entire lineup.
Maverick has many connotations to it, but it's obviously just a bold, strong name. And we came out with the Maverick as our boldest cigar. It’s like a Padron 1926 at half the price. Maybe not half, but I don't even know what it runs these days.
CA: A small car payment.
Neil: Yeah, exactly (laughs).
CA: Though we all know the Icarus fable, what makes its blend special?
Neil: Now Joel, my master blender, he's Puerto Rican and Dominican and he married a great gal who and they have a second home in Dayton, Tennessee. He came across this gentleman who was growing fired-cured tobacco.
We took a trip out of nothing more than just being friendly, and it turned out to be an unbelievable experience for us. The tobacco leaf by itself is massive. It's wrapper quality. We took over a year to play with that cigar to get it where we wanted. We were really curious if we even wanted to use Tennessee fire cured in the marketing at all, just because obviously the [Drew Estate] KFC [and similar cigars are] not what we were going after. Or the connotation the tobacco brings. We spent over a year working on the blend. We tried [fire-cured tobacco] as a binder. Shoot, we even played with it as a wrapper. That was way too much. As a binder, still too much. Then we started playing with it within the fillers and we came up with the blend after a lot of testing .
CA: We reviewed [Icarus] not that long ago and I think that one of our biggest takeaways was how the fire cured was more of a highlight than predominant feature.
Neil: Well said, and that's what we were trying to capture--to give something unique out there in the marketplace because there's only so many tobaccos you can blend with all the time. I mean, we import all kinds of stuff, whether it's Nicaragua, Honduras, obviously Dominican, Costa Rican—there's all kinds, but it's a unique component that we were fortunate to screw around with and make something that I think is special. I love it. I'm biased but I love it.
CA: What's something about the cigar industry that when you were getting into it you said, “I don't like that. I'm not doing that”?
Neil: Just from my background, I'm a catcher. I love to figure everything out. If you ask my wife, I can't help but want to help serve. As a catcher, you need to know where every person is on the field, what their position is [in relation to] the pitcher. He could be having an off night…whatever the case may be. How can we get them through five innings? I've taken that [mindset] with me in everything. That being said, I had no interest in doing any universal style blends. No interest in doing any ‘white label’ type stuff in the business and out of the gate; it wasn't even a thought to build a cigar brand. That's not why I started. What I've done, and what we've done as a team, was to go make--it was an avocation solely and wholeheartedly. It began to take a life from there. It wasn't about, “How many cigars can we sell?”
CA: What would you say is the hardest part of breaking out as an up-and-coming cigar manufacturer?
Neil: That’s a hell of a question and that is, by far, what I had no idea about. Growth. Marketing and growth. It was a crawl, walk and run proposition, and I was okay with that. And it's been slow and steady rather than quick and fizzle, at least for my estimation. I would much rather have 100 accounts doing a crap ton of volume, rather than 500 accounts doing a little volume. And luckily for us, we continue to grow slowly but steadily, really try to service the accounts we're withand to cultivate and provide true value for being in business together. And when that's authentic, and when that's accurate, and when that's true, and you live by integrity and character, good things generally come to follow. But it takes time. You cannot speed up experience. I wish we could. You can to some extent, if you learn from past mistakes, but my experience is, you can't fake your way into it.
CA: What’s your favorite Jake Wyatt cigar? And I know you guys always say, “Oh, I don't have a favorite child.”
Neil: Yeah, absolutely. I'm smoking the Lucid Interval right now. I smoke one damn near every morning. To say that's a favorite wouldn't be fair to say. I've really been into the Icarus.
CA: On a final note, your presentation, particularly when it comes to the design accents on some of your cigars, is impressive. With the added manpower, time, and expense that comes with these kinds of flairs, what was your reasoning to do so?
Neil: It was created by our original roller—truly a renaissance man. He was far too much of an artist to work solely as a roller, but his creativity was instrumental in shaping our early identity. He also helped train our original staff, who now make up the foundation of our current art department.
Since then, all the artisanal accents you see on cigars like the U.S.I.R., Herbert Spencer, and the rest of our Gourmet Collection are done by our unbelievably talented in-house team at the factory. So it was by happenstance, really, but it did give us a signature. And if we didn't own the factory, and he wasn't a part of that initial aspect of that foundation that we laid, it probably wouldn’t have happened. I mean, it's two extra days alone to put the accents on our cigars. But it really does give a pretty bitchin’ appearance.