Smoke and Steel records every Tuesday night in my garage in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania. This week we broke that rule. Sean, who runs The Burnable out of Louisiana, was in the area for work. He had the evening available, and instead of resting he made the two hour drive out to sit with us in person for the first time. It also happened to be the hottest day of the year. He said he brought the heat in more ways than one, and he was right.

Sean Drove Out from NJ

Sean flew into New Jersey for work and told us he could make it out on a Thursday, which is not our normal night. Everybody dropped what they had going on. Nobody hesitated.

Sean brought a mystery cigar for the group to smoke together, banded with a custom Smoke and Steel and Burnable collaboration band he had made himself. Sean called this the cigars unbanded segment of the show, and we had not done one in a while. It turned out to be a sweet tip Deadwood Tobacco stick called The Girl With No Name. Some of us got farther into it than others. Some of us needed a chaser.

The Bingo Board He Built From Ten Months of Us

Here is the part that got us. A while back I made an offhand comment on the show about how much we repeat ourselves. I said someone should make a bingo board out of it. Sean took that seriously.

He pulled the transcripts from episodes 8 through 46, about ten months of Smoke and Steel, fed them into Gemini, and asked for the top repeated statements. He filtered out common phrases and kept what was actually us: intros, outros, people we reference constantly, catchphrases. He landed on 72 statements and built six different boards so nobody had the same layout.

Jim won. He got bingo on brick and mortar, which somehow nobody had said out loud for over an hour despite it being exactly the kind of thing we say.

What The Burnable Actually Is

Sean started smoking seriously in 2022 and fell in hard by 2024. He began journaling on Facebook, posting photos of each cigar on its stand, the cut, and the burn. That grew into a following in a Louisiana cigar group and later the Asshole’s Club, a national group with local chapters. Big Rob runs the Louisiana chapter and encouraged Sean to start posting there too.

Eventually Sean built his own site, The Burnable, because Facebook was not built to hold what he wanted to track. He records price paid, intensity, and a flavor wheel for every cigar. Instead of a single review that never changes, he treats every cigar like a living page. Every time he smokes something again, that entry updates with a new score, and the overall rating becomes an aggregate across every time he has smoked it.

He gave the example of the Foundation 10th Anniversario. His first one was flat and disappointing. If that had been his only data point, the review would have been unfair. He smoked several more, they were excellent, and the aggregate score reflects that instead of one bad stick.

He does not accept sponsorships. He buys every cigar himself. That is intentional. He wants the reviews to hold up.

What We Smoked in the Garage

Beyond the mystery Girl With No Name, the table had a wide spread. Rob had the Blackened M81, the Drew Estate and Metallica collaboration. Eric was on the Room 101 15th Anniversary. Mark smoked the Oliva Monticello, a Holt’s exclusive that only shows up at real discount when they run a box sale. Later in the night Eric lit a Gris Gris, the LACC exclusive made by Tabacalera La Isla.

Big Iron and Why It Almost Wasn’t Called That

We got back into the story behind Big Iron, the Definition house blend exclusive to LACC. Jamond was not sold on the idea of a big ring gauge cigar at first. Kyle wanted a cowboy theme and the name Big Iron. Jamond, who is from Dallas, was not exactly feeling like a cowboy. Big Rob wanted a 6×60. There was real back and forth on the blend before everyone agreed. Now that it exists, everyone in the garage rates it as one of the best things LACC carries.

Sean Skips the Retrohale, and It Works for Him

Retrohaling came up, and Sean said flatly that he does not do it. It burns his sinuses out and he loses the ability to taste anything right after. Instead he lets the smoke sit on the back of his tongue against the roof of his mouth and pulls the flavor that way. He referenced a reviewer he respects, who stopped retrohaling, and caught grief for it online. Sean’s answer to that criticism was simple. He is still getting the flavors.

The Soto Travel Lighter

Eddie and Sean walked through a travel setup worth mentioning if you fly with cigars. It is a Soto travel lighter, built originally for camping. You buy the refillable Bic style insert, fill it with normal butane, and pop it into the torch conversion piece. The Bic insert alone is small enough to carry on through TSA. The torch shell goes in a checked bag. Put them together at your destination and you have a full strength single flame torch lighter without gambling on whatever overpriced lighter your hotel gift shop is selling.

Local Shops, Online Retailers, and Where Cigars Actually Sit

Sean buys first from Big Rob and Kyle at LACC because they are his local shop and he is a member. After that he goes to Small Batch, run by Andrew, for brands LACC does not carry. Online discounters come last, mostly for exclusives he cannot get anywhere else.

The reasoning matters. Cigars that ship to your house sit on delivery trucks in whatever heat that truck is running that day. Cigars that arrive at a shop still sit in stock for a week or two before they even hit the shelf. Neither path is instant, but a local shop gives you a person to talk to and a membership discount to go with it.

We also got into the regulatory side. New York and California have both passed generational tobacco bans that would apply to cigars along with cigarettes, which lumps premium hand rolled tobacco into the same category as mass produced cigarettes. Nobody at the table thinks that distinction is fair, and it is a conversation we will keep having as more states look at similar laws.

Stay in the Conversation

If you want to see the whole night, including the full bingo board reveal and Jim’s victory lap, subscribe to the Stogie Review YouTube channel where Smoke and Steel lives every week. And if you want to keep talking cigars with us between episodes, come hang out on the Stogie Review Discord. That is where the real conversation happens.