Smoke and Steel is a cigar podcast that records every Tuesday night in my garage in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania. The core crew has been sitting around together smoking cigars and talking for years. We just weren’t recording it. The only thing that changed when we turned the cameras on is that now you can pull up a chair.
This week we pulled up a chair for Rob Blumenthal, owner of Tradecraft Cigars, who joined us virtually from his shop, the Tinder Box in Haverford, Pennsylvania. We had a full table for it. Mark, Eric Drumheller, Eric the Elder, Eddie, Jim, Rob, and me. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, the topic that kept pulling us back was the Tradecraft Cigars Gladius, and by the end of the night it had won over guys at the table who don’t even usually reach for a maduro.
Table of Contents
Five Generations Deep, and He’s Just Getting Started
Rob isn’t new to this business. He’s fifth generation. His father, Gary Blumenthal, and Gary’s uncle, Dan Blumenthal, built Villazon into a name that carried Punch, Hoyo de Monterrey, El Rey del Mundo, and Excalibur. The family sold those brands to General Cigar back around 1996. Rob grew up behind the counter at Tinder Box, watching his dad work with a Cuban roller who sat a few feet away from him. He wasn’t just around cigars. He was raised inside the business.
Tradecraft is his. Not a Tinder Box house brand, not something built on the family name. He launched it at the end of 2025 and told us he wanted it to become one of the great boutique brands in the country.
Why He Named a Cigar After a CIA Operation
Rob doesn’t name a cigar before he blends it. He blends it, smokes it, and lets the finished cigar tell him what it wants to be called.
The Gladius came first. He said the second he smoked it, he knew it needed a bold name, something with weight. Gladius is the short sword the Roman legions carried into battle, and that’s exactly the feeling he wanted. The wrapper is a fire cured San Andrés maduro from the Turrent family, aged three to five years before it goes on the cigar, and it’s built to be full bodied. Think baker’s chocolate, savory meat, baking spice, and earth, with citrus and cinnamon showing up on the retrohale. It comes in a Robusto, a Toro, a limited Belicoso, and now the box press.
The Azorian came from an unexpected place. Rob named it after Operation Azorian, a real CIA mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine. He said the word itself just sounded like an island paradise to him, and the cigar is warm, tropical, and sweet. It’s wrapped in an oily, reddish brown Ecuadorian Habano leaf over a Sumatran binder, and the flavor leans into caramel, earth, a little baking spice, and sweet rum. It’s available in a Robusto, a Toro, and a Corona Gorda.
The Vitruvian pays homage to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man sketch. It’s his Connecticut blend, built to have more sides and more complexity than a typical mild cigar, and the name fit the idea of showing every angle of something at once. It’s wrapped in a Grade A Ecuadorian Connecticut leaf over a Sumatran binder, and it comes through with sweet citrus, earth, mineral, and cream, all without losing that mild to medium body. Right now it only comes in one size, a 6×50 Toro.
He Cut His Prices While Everyone Else Is Raising Theirs
This is the part of the conversation that actually stopped the table for a second. While most of the industry is raising prices, sometimes twice a year, Rob just lowered his. His line went from around $15 a cigar down into the $13.50 range.
He negotiated better importation and shipping costs and passed the savings straight through instead of pocketing the margin. He told us he’s still early enough in the brand’s life that he wanted to set the right tone from the start, because raising prices later is easy and lowering them after people already know you is a lot harder.
The Gladius Wins the Table
We’ve had cigars split our group plenty of times. Not this one. Rob Blumenthal said flat out that the Gladius is his favorite maduro, the one where if you don’t like it, he genuinely doesn’t know what to tell you. Eric pointed out that when our own Rob speaks that highly of a cigar, it means something, since he’s one of the toughest critics we’ve got at the table.
Mark usually reaches for a habano first. Not this time. He told the table he smoked the Gladius before anything else in the line, and now the Vitruvian is starting to sneak in there too. That’s the kind of thing that happens with a cigar that actually earns it instead of one that just gets talked about.
Will Turned Eddie’s Segment Into a Tradecraft Commercial
Eric told us a story from earlier in the week that says a lot about how far Tradecraft has already traveled. Eddie runs a segment called Eddie on the Streets, where he shows up at a shop with a camera and puts together about five minutes on what makes that shop worth a visit. This one happened to be at Chartwell, right down the road from us. Will, who owns the place, had his own five minutes to work with, and he spent part of it talking up Tradecraft instead of his own shop. Nobody asked him to do that. That’s a brand getting into the bloodstream of the local scene on its own.
What’s Coming Next
The Gladius box press launches with a pre sale this Saturday through Tinder Box and the Wooden Indian, tied to a party for the Great Cigars Podcast’s ten year anniversary. Rob described the box press as smoking closer to a Nicaraguan, with the San Andrés wrapper pushing the chocolate and spice notes harder than the round vitolas do.
He’s also got a fourth line coming, called Shinobi, built at Tabacalera La Isla with blender Hostos Fernández. It’s a Sumatran wrapper over Nicaraguan filler and Connecticut broadleaf, coming in a black lacquer box with Japanese banding, and Rob said it should be on shelves within a month or so. On top of that, he’s planning a smaller 42 x 4.00 vitola across the Gladius and Azorian lines, aimed for release later this year.
We asked Rob to keep us posted the next time there’s an event at Chartwell, we’d love to show up and support the brand.
Stay in the Conversation
If you want to see this whole conversation with Rob Blumenthal, head over and subscribe to the Stogie Review YouTube channel, where Smoke and Steel lives alongside everything else we’re putting out. If you want to keep talking Tradecraft, the Gladius, or anything else from this episode, come hang out in the Stogie Review Discord with the rest of the crew. And if you want to support the show directly, check out the Smoke and Steel Merch Store and grab something for the garage.
