Flavored Cigars Worth Trying

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear “flavored cigars?” Vanilla? Cherry? Yuck? Well not so fast on that “yuck.” Though they might not be the cigars of choice for the majority of premium cigar smokers, flavored cigars are extremely popular. Ranging from convenience store-priced machine made cigars like Backwoods and Phillies, to affordable handmade premiums like Tatiana and CAO Flavours and more “up-market” selections like Java and Tabak Especial (both by Drew Estate),
there’s a good flavored cigar in any price category to suit every cigar smoker.

As when shopping for traditional non-flavored cigars, quality and value are key. For instance, you can buy a pack of 8 Backwoods Honey Berry (4 ½ x 27) machine-made cigars for around $4.50. Compared to a pack of 8 Ugly Coyote Honey Berry (4 ¼ x 32) at $6.50, not only are Ugly Coyote cigars handmade, but they use all natural fillers, and with their 32 ring, you’re getting more cigar for less money. Moreover, they’re available only at Famous Smoke Shop.

Take cigars like the Tatiana Mocha selection for example. They’re are all-premium handmade cigars blended with the flavors of luxury chocolates, vanilla essence and caffea robusta. Mocha and similar coffee-flavored cigars make great selections because cigars and coffee tend to go hand-in-hand, no pun intended. Tatiana also makes a wide variety of “standard” flavors like Chocolate, Cherry, Vanilla, and Honey to name a few.

Another noteworthy brand of coffee-infused cigars is Tabak Especial by Drew Estate. These cigars come in your choice of dark Connecticut Broadleaf and light natural Connecticut Shade wrappers. The filler is Nicaraguan Criollo, and before aging, the cigars are slowly infused with Nicaraguan estate-grown coffee. Tabak Especial and similar cigars such as Java by Drew Estate are the crème de la crème, but you can also expect to pay more for these cigars.

For the value-minded cigar buyer, there’s Solo Café. This is a bundle cigar, also exclusive to Famous Smoke Shop, that uses Dominican filler & binder tobaccos rolled in dark Indonesian wrappers with sweetened caps. The smoke is rich yet mild, with an appealing coffee flavored character, and prices start at under $40 for a bundle of 20 Coronas.

For an even more complex-tasting experience, there are the “gourmet” flavored cigars. CAO was the first cigar manufacturer to seriously dive into this market with their CAO Flavours line. One flavor for example is Moontrance. Moontrance is a Nicaraguan filler/Cameroon wrapper blend infused with natural exotic fruit and bourbon vanilla extracts, Georgia peach nectar, Hawaiian white honey, and other organic fruit extracts. Other CAO flavours include such names as Caramelo Joe, Cherry Bomb, and Karma Sutra Splash.

Following CAO is Tatiana, who has been making excellent flavored premium cigars for years. Produced by La Aurora in the Dominican Republic, in addition to the more complex Tatiana Mocha (mentioned above),
there’s also a Tatiana flavored cigar named Waking Dream which uses oak-barrel-aged Dominican tobaccos infused with herbs and flavors of vanilla cream, hazelnuts and single malt whisky.

So when it comes to flavored cigars, there are plenty from which to choose. Many have become so popular that even cigar smokers who ordinarily might have snubbed them at one time are now willing to add them to their collections.