There’s a version of this hobby where you buy a box of what you know, smoke it down, and buy another. Safe. Predictable. A little boring. Then there’s the version where you’ve got a box pass circulating through six states, two cigar subscription packs landing at your door every month, a Discord that nearly got wiped out by a platform crackdown, and a merch store that went from idea to live while we were still recording. That’s where we are. Episode 044 of Smoke and Steel finds us in the usual spot – Walt’s garage in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania – but the conversation kept running in directions we didn’t plan for, and those are always the best nights.

Eric was back from the Dominican Republic with stories, cigar factory receipts, and a Cuban he gave his brother on the beach at 10:30 in the morning. The rest of us had plenty to add.

What We Were Smoking

No shortage of interesting sticks around the fire pit this night.

Eric lit up the LFD 30th Anniversary – a return to the flower band, as he put it. He likes LFD, always has, but he was honest about the price point. When you’re getting it out of a collective pack, it’s a great smoke. Paying $35 to $40 retail for something that’s just okay when there’s so much competition in that range? That math is getting harder to justify, and he said so plainly.

Mark was on the El Mago, a new upstart brand mostly for its wild packaging – leopard print tubes, Band-Aid tins.. The marketing is loud. The cigar, at least this one, was harsh. Mark didn’t sugarcoat it. The rest of us pointed out what we always say: when a brand is spending that much energy on the packaging, sometimes it’s because the smoke can’t carry the weight on its own. We’ll give it a fair shot, but first impressions weren’t great.

Eric (the elder) brought a Stolen Throne Yorktown Fleet torpedo, box press. Rob was on the Plasencia Alma Fuerte. Jim pulled out a Sultans of Smoke he’d been sitting on for about twelve years, which got the reaction it deserved. And Walt smoked the H. Upmann Heritage by AJ Fernandez – introduced to him from a package Sean from The Burnable sent a couple episodes back. Walt burned through that entire bag fast, liked them enough to grab a bundle from Cigar Page on sale for around a hundred bucks, and called it well worth it.

Eric’s Dominican Republic Trip: Factory Tours and Beach Vendors

Eric came back a different person. His words, more or less.

He made it out to the Don Lucas cigar factory while he was down there – a compound setup where the kids could hit the shops while the adults did the tour and smoked wherever they pleased. Ashtrays everywhere. Smoke anywhere on the property. He said it was like what you’d want a mall to be if you ran the world. The selection leaned toward the tourist end of the market, so it wasn’t an LFD or a La Aurora situation, but he picked up a few things worth having. Some aged Davidoffs. Some old Tatuajes he could barely see through the cellophane. He grabbed those.

The Cubans on the beach were a different story. The guys working the shoreline were pushing cellophane Cohibas for five bucks apiece and swearing they were real. Eric told one of them he didn’t smoke. While holding a cigar. The Cubans he actually bought – the cheaper ones from the resort were incredible, he said. His brother had his first Cuban sitting on the beach that morning, and by all accounts it landed well.

He also came back with some FOMO about PCA. He was on an island while everyone else was posting photos from the floor, and even with his feet in the sand he was looking at those Instagram videos going, “man, that looks like a good time.” We felt that.

PCA Takeaways From the Garage

None of us were on the floor this year, but the information filtered back.

Definition Cigars had a big showing. Their new releases – the Kinsman, the Pivot, and a few others – got strong early reviews, and Eric is quietly becoming a serious Definition guy. He won an LACC lotto before the episode and came home with a full set of the new line for $24 in tickets. A hundred dollars in smokes for under twenty-five bucks is a hard result to argue with.

ChiMolly had a night at LACC too – their event offered event-only lanceros in three blends including the Pioneer and the Blue for anyone who bought enough sticks. We’re going to have to get our hands on those.

Our friend Charlie from Abbina Craft Sipping Soda made the Half Wheel top 20 coolest things at PCA this year, coming in at number two. He said he would’ve been happy just getting a mention. Getting the number two spot was something else. Well deserved.

Sean from The Burnable was working the floor on our behalf – dropping cards, starting conversations, getting the wheels moving on some guests we’ve been trying to land. If you’re a regular listener, you know Sean. He’s also going to be on the fan appreciation episode for Cinco de Mayo and getting a full episode of his own when the weather warms up. He earned it.

Cigar Subscription Clubs: What’s Worth It and What Isn’t

This is where the conversation got genuinely useful, and it’s worth spelling out because the question comes up constantly.

We’re both on the LA Cigar Collective and Small Batch packs, and the short version is: they’ve changed the way we smoke. Eric (the elder) put it well, it brought him back to the days of walking into a brick and mortar and asking Jim what was worth trying. You’re getting things you’d never buy on your own, you’re finding out about them before you smoke them, and occasionally you’re sitting on a cigar you didn’t know was rare until you read the card.

The LA Cigar Collective in particular does something smart. The index cards they include with each pack have photos, background on the cigar, and now the date. Eric went back through his stack and couldn’t tell which month was which until they added the date. Small detail, but it matters when you’re keeping notes. Which Eric does – he writes down the price, what he thought of it, and whether he’d go back for more. That’s the right way to do it.

The caveat, and it’s an important one: not all cigar of the month club subscriptions are the same. There are companies out there putting together packs from what they couldn’t move out of the back of their humidor. The first two months are great, the third month you get garbage, and by month four you’ve cancelled and you’re telling people on a Facebook comment that subscription clubs are a scam. We’ve heard that story.

The rule of thumb we’ve landed on: look for companies with a real stake in the boutique market. That’s where you get value, curation, and someone who actually cares what goes in the box. Big online retailers doing cigar clubs are a different product. We’d also keep an eye on Creekside – we’ve heard good things, haven’t done a full rundown yet, but the name keeps coming up.

Discord Drama, Box Pass Update, and the Merch Store

Discord came up because it almost didn’t exist anymore. A wave of platform enforcement hit cigar communities hard – servers that had been running for years, thousands of members, gone. The issue was buying and selling tobacco. We talked about it last week but the short version is: we don’t sell on ours, we’re not planning to, and we renamed things to be safe. We’d hate to lose what we’ve got right now, especially when the community is actually gaining traction.

The box pass is nearly through its first full run – six guys left before it comes back to home base. When it does, we’re going to take a break, clean everything up, map out how many miles it actually traveled, and figure out whether we go quarterly or three times a year going forward. Eighteen people is a lot to coordinate. The box itself is in good shape – it skewed a little more expensive than we expected, which is a good problem to have, but Rob was hoping for wall-to-wall Opus and did not find that.

On the merch front: the store is coming along. We partnered with Troy at ShirtDevil.com out of Las Vegas – someone who’s been doing custom work for years and wanted to build more ongoing partnerships in 2026. Shirts, hats, beanies, sweatshirts, mugs, flags – he handles the shipping, we handle pointing you there. Go buy something. Send us a picture of you wearing it.

Upcoming: Smoke-onos Festival and the Fan Appreciation Episode

Three weeks out from recording, we’re heading to the Smoke-onos Festival in the Poconos. We’ve got the General Admission package – 35 cigars, a tactical bag, an ashtray, the works. Eddie’s mounting a camera in the truck for the drive up. It’ll be a mini episode. We’re going to film the whole day and make something out of it.

Before that, the Cinco de Mayo fan appreciation episode drops. Sean from The Burnable is popping in. Eric (the elder) son’s custom wood carving – coins and a plaque – might be making its debut that night if the timing works out. It’s shaping up to be a good one.

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