Tuesday night in the garage means the same thing every week. We light up, we catch up, and somebody usually leaves with a new favorite. We also circled back to the Atabey Black Ritos, the cigar Golf Stogie sent us that’s been holding down the number two spot on our list. Smoke and Steel records every Tuesday night in my garage in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania. The core crew has been sitting around smoking and talking for years. We just started pointing a camera at it.
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What We Lit and Who Sent It
Mark went full Roman theme for the night. Jim had a Johnny Tobacconaut Maduro. Eric and I were both back on the Atabey, the one Golf Stogie sent us a while back. It retails for a staggering amount of money, more than any of us would spend on our own, but free changes the math. I lit mine before I knew the price. Had I known, I might have grabbed something else.
The Atabey Earns Its Spot at Number Two
We put the Atabey Black Ritos at number two on our list a while back, and tonight we asked ourselves if it still belongs there. The answer was yes, though not without a caveat. Judged just on flavor and burn, it’s closer to a four for most of us. It’s a solid medium bodied smoke with real creaminess, but it doesn’t hit with the punch we usually go for. What keeps it at number two is everything around it. The construction is flawless. The story behind the blend is still murky to us, and we got far enough into speculating about who actually makes it that we decided to strike the whole thing from the record until we can confirm it properly. None of us would pay sixty dollars for it out of our own pocket. That’s a real number to sit with. But free from Golf Stogie, smoked side by side with the Padron 64 sitting untouchable at number one, the Atabey held its ground.
The Old Scotsman and the Half-Smoked Liga
Bruce told us about a night at Chartwell that still gets brought up. An older Scottish gentleman walked in, friendly and talkative, and sat down near an ashtray where somebody had left half a cigar. Someone joked that he could have it if he wanted. He took the joke seriously. A few minutes later the whole room noticed at once that he’d already lit it and had it going. Nobody said a word. They just let him finish, then talked about it for the rest of the afternoon.
Cigar Conspiracy Corner: Moonflower and Blood Medicine
I went down a rabbit hole this week and I’m not sorry about it. A while back I watched Jon Huber from Crowned Heads on the Creekside Podcast tell the story behind Blood Medicine. The cigar was originally going to be called Snake Oil, but a trademark dispute over the name pushed Jon to pivot. He ended up naming it after an old blood medicine advertisement he saw painted on a wall in a building a friend owned in Tennessee.
That story stuck with me. So when I lit up a Blood Medicine this week, I went looking for a song called Snake Oil to play while I took a picture for Instagram. I found one called Snake Oil Sally, and it’s now permanently on my playlist. There’s a lyric in that song about a woman with moonflower in her pocket. Moonflower is a real plant, part of the morning glory family, poisonous to dogs, horses, and cats. It was also a name old patent medicine sellers used for a different plant entirely, one pushed as a miracle cure for things like asthma. It worked fast and looked like magic until you found out it could cause hallucinations and death in the wrong dose.
Crowned Heads has a cigar called Moonflower. I put that together with Blood Medicine and the old Snake Oil name and started building a theory about a thread connecting the whole line. I called it cigar conspiracy corner and I stand by the name.
Then Bruce mentioned that Jon actually has a video explaining where Moonflower really came from, and it has nothing to do with poison or patent medicine. It’s about his wife. So much for my conspiracy. The real story was better than the one I made up.
Moonflower Splits the Room
Moonflower has been the cigar everyone is talking about this year, the way My Father Blue was last year. Between us we’ve smoked a handful and the reviews were mixed. The first half inch on more than one of them came in bitter. It smoothed out and got better every time, but a few of us walked away thinking it was a good cigar rather than the cigar of the year everyone online is calling it. We still owe it another round before we make a final call.
New in the Humidors and What We’d Pack in Five
Everybody came in loaded this week. Between LACC sampler packs, a CRA pack loaded with high end offerings from Padron, Fuente, and JC Newman, and a box of Tabernacle double coronas, the humidors are full.
Later on somebody floated a hypothetical. If you could only walk away with five cigars for the rest of your life, what would they be?. Padron 1964 came up almost every single time, along with the Atabey, Big Iron, and the Room 101 15th Anniversary. A few guys threw in the RomaCraft Fomorian, the candela none of us expected to love as much as we do. It’s a good reminder that after all the new releases and hype cigars we chase every week, the list of what we’d actually keep forever is pretty short and pretty consistent.
If We Ever Open the Smoke and Steel Lounge
Joe Macko sent in a question we couldn’t resist. If the crew opened a lounge together, who takes which job. I claimed silent owner, the guy in the corner who doesn’t talk to customers. Mark got quality control, which tracks. Bruce got the behind the scenes work, talking to brands and handling inventory. Eddie got decorator, since he’s probably been in more lounges than the rest of us combined. We’re still missing a location and a half million dollars, but the roles are locked in. If St. Peter’s Village ever actually goes up for sale at a price we could touch, we’ve got a plan.
Stay in the Conversation
If you want to see the Atabey Black Ritos and the Roman theme in person, head over to the Stogie Review YouTube channel and catch the full episode. We hang out with the crew every day over on the Stogie Review Discord, and that’s also where you’ll catch early releases before they hit YouTube. And if you want to rep the show, check out the Smoke and Steel Merch Store. We’d love to see you wearing it out in the wild.
