It was a Tuesday night in May, and we were all settled into the garage when Eric mentioned, almost in passing, that he was celebrating eight years of sobriety. That was why he came in with an Opus X. He’d been holding onto it, waiting for the right moment. This was it.

That’s the kind of thing that makes you sit back for a second. We gave him a hard time about being pretentious. That’s just how we do it. But everybody in that garage knew what eight years means. Cheers all around. Good night to be here.

What We Were Smoking

Eric came correct with the Opus X 13th, and he earned every puff of it. Jim was working through a Patina Maduro he pulled from the bottom of his humidor. Mark had a Dead Drift Wildfire out of his Small Batch pack. Rob was on an Undercrown by Drew Estate and had also picked up a Don Carlos Blood of the Bull earlier in the week. He said it might be the one cigar he would smoke if he could only pick one. High praise from Rob. I went with a Big Iron from Definition.

Later in the night, a few of us were working through cigars from the Definition line. It’s a newer brand we’ve been getting through the collective pack. We ended up talking about them mostly by band color, which tells you everything you need to know about how new they are to our rotation. The yellow band was on the table. The green band had come up the night before and got a strong review. Light, airy smoke. Very little weight to them physically, but they perform. We’re watching this brand. The guy behind it is all over Instagram, makes a good product, and by all accounts is a genuinely good person. When you’ve got all three of those things working, there’s no reason you shouldn’t succeed.

The Don Carlos Conversation Nobody Wins

Rob mentioned the Don Carlos Blood of the Bull. Half Wheel gave it a 97 rating. The MSRP is $17. Our local shop had them priced well above that.

That opened up the conversation we’ve all had before and never really resolve. At what point does secondary market pricing cross a line? Eric had a story about walking into a shop in Ocean City, Maryland during the Andalusian Bull craze and seeing them at $65 or $70 a stick. He walked out. That’s four times MSRP, and there’s a point where you just have to say no and mean it.

The honest answer is that it’s capitalism and it doesn’t stop unless enough people stop buying. We’re not naive enough to think our group opting out moves the needle. But it’s the principle. Fuente is still selling to retailers at wholesale. The retailer is the one making the call on price. And when every retailer does it on the same cigars, it just becomes the new normal.

We’ve all paid over MSRP at least once. Most of us regret it at least a little.

Fan Questions – Eric Running Point

Eric had a good batch of questions from the group this week and we ran through most of them.

JJ Creed asked how many times you give a cigar a chance before you write off the whole line. The consensus was that nobody condemns a full line over one bad stick. If you bought a five-pack, you smoke most of it before you make a call. If you picked up a single and it was rough, you might not go back for a while, but you go back eventually. The first impression carries more weight when you’re buying singles off the shelf. When you’re buying in bundles, you give it room.

JJ also asked whether a bad recommendation changes how much you trust that person going forward. One miss is survivable. Multiple misses and you stop listening. The caveat everybody landed on: you really only take recommendations from people who know your flavor profile. If someone knows what you smoke and still steers you wrong, that stings more than a bad tip from a stranger.

James Cigar Aficionado 315 sent in a good one. Is the cigar community shifting back toward value and consistency, or is boutique and premium hype still winning? The honest answer is that economics are doing the work right now. Gas is expensive. Everything is expensive. The days of smoking back-to-back Opus X on a Friday without thinking twice are gone for most of us. People are getting more deliberate about when they go premium and when they don’t. That’s not a bad thing.

Joe Macko asked what our Smoke and Steel booth at PCA would look like and who would do what. We went full fantasy on this one. Gothic thrones. Suits of armor. Walt on the floor working the crowd. Eric holding it down at the booth greeting people. Rob out talking to brands and convincing them they need to be on the show. Eric the elder as security, ready to put someone in an armbar if things got weird. It was a good few minutes.

Kyle from LACC sent a desert island question. If you were stranded and could only bring one person from the extended crew, Big Rob, Dave West, Sean from the Burnable, or Kyle himself, who are you taking? Dave West won the room. He always has good cigars, he always has good bourbon, and his years in the military mean he actually knows survival skills. Rob would cook well, but he might eat you first. Sean would figure out how to build a radio and get us rescued. Kyle is a little too comfortable being shirtless. Dave was the pick.

Jason asked about lounge memberships. What’s a fair price point and what should you expect to get for it? This one opened things up. We used to pay $350 at the place we belonged to, and that felt about right. Places like Cigar Mojo are up around a thousand, but you get store credit back, so it’s more like prepaying for cigars than paying a straight fee. The math has to work. If you’re not getting your money back in some form, store credit, discounts, meaningful access, something, it’s hard to justify. None of us are locker guys. Never were.

That question pulled us into a longer conversation about what the old lounge actually meant to us. Sandy bringing food down on Sundays. Knowing you could show up at 10:30 on Christmas Eve and Mark would be there. Never having to wonder if someone was going to be around. Thirty or forty guys, always something happening, always something being planned. It wasn’t perfect. But it was something. The guys who were real stayed real. That’s how you know.

A Few Other Things Worth Mentioning

The fan appreciation episode from last week landed well. The Discord and Facebook were active all week with guys saying they felt appreciated and had a good time. Joe Macko’s comment that Rob was slowly becoming his favorite got some mileage. So did Jason’s observation that Eric talks too much. Both landed. Both were accurate.

The community box pass is down to its last stop. Eighteen members, done in about two or three months. Nobody held onto it longer than they needed to. We’ll do it again.

Eric, Eddid, and I are heading to the Smok-onos Festival this weekend. The event runs all day with a tailgate at 10 in the morning and bands going until 11 at night. We all agreed pretty quickly that we’re not staying until 11. The goal is to get there, smoke some cigars, talk to some people, grab some food, and get out by 6. That works for everyone.

Shoutout to Sean from the Burnable for sending hats to the crew. Jim and Eric were wearing them on the episode. Sean has a cigar review site worth checking out, and we are looking forward to having him on for a full episode to talk about the Burnable and the work he’s been doing.

I also put out a reminder. If you have ideas for the daily discussion topics on the Stogie Review social pages, send them to walt@stogiereview.com. We’ve been running those consecutively for over 200 days and the well gets harder to draw from every week. Real ideas from real cigar people are more useful than anything AI has been generating, which keeps suggesting scenarios that would never actually happen in a cigar shop.

Stay in the Conversation

New episodes of Smoke and Steel drop weekly on the Stogie Review YouTube channel. Subscribe so you don’t miss one. And if you want to be part of the conversation between episodes, come find us on the Stogie Review Discord. That’s where the fans show up, the questions get asked, and Rob finds out that Joe Macko got a better cigar haul than he did.