Years ago, when I first began visiting local cigar shops, I developed a bad habit of avoiding anything from La Aurora with the old-school-looking lion band. No matter what size or shape I tried, I just couldn’t enjoy it, no matter how hard I tried. That early distaste for the cigar still causes a bit of prejudice towards the line today.

When I first got word about the La Aurora Corojo, I was excited. Being a bit of a Corojo Fanatic, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the new line. The first time I laid eyes on it and saw the older style band, doubt burst forward in my mind. I lit up the first sample and was relieved, it wasn’t bad, not even a little bit!

A couple of years went by and the cigar slipped off my radar. When Jerry sent me a care package a few weeks back, I was thrilled to find a couple La Aurora Corojo Coronas included. I couldn’t wait to revisit the cigar and see if it was as good as I had remembered.

I smoked the first, of two, cigars in the package and thought I would try something a little different. The plan was to blatantly rip off Brian Hewitt’s Patented Tower of Burn and use it in a review of my own. While the end result came out pretty cool, it was more work than I bargained for (getting up every ten minutes to setup and photograph the cigar was a bit much).

The first cigar smoked beautifully. The second one, not so much. Taking the cigar from a warm environment into a cold one must have been too much for the wrapper. The fragile leaf gave way and burst. Since I had already invested so much time in my very own Tower of Burn, there was no way I wasn’t going to review the cigar.

I set flame to foot and gambled. I was amazed, the cigar made it all the way through the review without a catastrophic failure. Despite being very ugly, it smoked great. The dominant flavor profile was made up of woody tones with an aftertaste that reminded me of slightly over-roasted nuts (a little smokey and a little bitter). The smoke was medium bodied and medium flavored with a mildly dry finish.

Aside from the wrapper looking absolutely dreadful, the cigar was smoking well. Each puff produced rich smoke that coated the palate. Frequent touch-ups were needed due to the wrapper issues but they didn’t seem to affect the taste.

At a little more than $6 per cigar, the price is a little more than I’d like to pay for an everyday smoke. Even so, I wouldn’t gripe too much when it came time to buy. I thoroughly enjoyed the La Aurora Corojo and hope to find them during my next trip to the Cigars International Superstore in Hamburg.