We record every Tuesday night in my garage in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania. Same guys, same chairs, same cigars most weeks. The show is just us finally pointing a camera at something we were already doing. That’s the whole premise. Most nights, the biggest story is somebody’s flooded drive home or a good deal on a five-pack. Episode 60 wasn’t most nights.
Rob had just gotten back from a fraternity reunion, and by his own admission it was a good time right up until he threw up. Cigars were smoked. Bourbon was had. He said he’s glad it’s only once a year, because he’d be dead otherwise. That kind of night is how the episode always starts. It’s not how it ended.
Table of Contents
What We Were Smoking
Mark had the Warped Isla del Sol Crocodilo, the one the Discord just calls the croc, because of course it does. Eric was on an Ashton VSG, paired with a vintage ashtray his dad picked up at the Philadelphia Zoo. I had a Lampert Platino in the A size going, which turned out to matter more than I expected. Bruce had the Cohiba Serie M Reserva Plata 2026. Rob was on an Ashton Heritage Puro Sol. Jim lit a Tradecraft Vitruvian.
Why We Won’t Beg You to Follow Us
Our numbers have been climbing lately in a way none of us can fully explain. A ten-subscriber bump overnight. Discord filling up faster than we’re used to. Guys telling us they went back and watched every episode from the beginning before catching up live, which still blows my mind every time someone says it.
Eric the Elder brought up a Facebook group called Cigar Lovers Club, 54,000 members deep, where people have started posting about us without us asking. If even one percent of that group finds their way over, that’s a real number.
I’ll be honest with you here, because it came up and I’d rather just say it plainly. I am not comfortable with self-promotion. I’d be mortified dropping our own link into someone else’s Discord. I want the show to get shared because people actually like it, not because we asked them to. Maybe that makes us a slower grind than some of the bigger shows out there. I think the slow build wins the race. We’re not chasing a hundred thousand people who scroll past us. We’re building a room full of guys who’d rather be at a lounge that doesn’t exist anywhere but here.
Merch, a Raffle, and a Guy Named Troy
Troy runs our merch shop. He’s a friend of Eric’s, not someone I know personally, but he’s quietly turned into one of the better parts of this whole operation. He didn’t have to throw in extras with orders. He just started doing it on his own, stickers and koozies and, in one accidental case, actual sheet music that ended up in someone’s box by accident. He told me he wants to do a raffle now, shipping and item covered on his end, because he’s been blown away by how our fans have supported him. We haven’t nailed down the details yet, but keep an eye out.
The Price Increase Nobody’s Thrilled About
Scandinavian Tobacco Group announced a price increase across most of its US handmade portfolio starting August 3rd, somewhere in the 3 to 6 percent range depending on who you ask and where in the chain you’re looking. The frustrating part is figuring out where that number actually lands by the time it hits a shop counter, because a wholesale bump doesn’t always stay a wholesale bump once a retailer gets their hands on it.
Rob had the most honest take on it. He used to live on Fuente. Cigars he loved, brand he was loyal to for years. He’s pulled back from it now, not because the cigars changed, but because he’s watched retailers push prices to a point where he’d rather spend that money elsewhere. He brought a handful of Zino Nicaraguans to a fraternity reunion recently, five for twenty bucks on sale, and his buddies went nuts over them. Loved them more than the pricier stuff he used to bring. There’s still good, affordable cigars out there if you’re willing to look past the names everyone assumes you have to smoke.
What’s Actually Landing Right Now
HDA has been putting out solid content, including a conversation with Dave Imber from Creekside about growth problems most shops would kill to have. Worth a watch if you haven’t seen it.
The lines HDA sells haven’t changed, but the factory behind them has, moving from Black Label over to Rojas. Same names on the bands, different hands doing the rolling, and that’s worth knowing if you’re comparing notes on why something might taste a little different than you remember.
La Flor Dominicana’s Carbon Flower cigars are finally landing after we talked about them pre-release for what felt like forever. The presentation is genuinely gorgeous, full carbon fiber look, band matching the case. You’re paying for that case, and I get why some guys will skip it, but the cigar itself is one I still want to try on its own.
And then there’s the Atabey Black Ritos. We first talked about this one weeks ago and honestly underestimated it. This was close, real close, to knocking the Padron 1964 off the top of our list. That doesn’t happen often.
The Top 25 Gets a Shake-Up
The Lampert Platino in the A size, the same one I had going all night, earned its way in as our new number four, sitting above the Tabernacle and just below the New Dawn. That’s not a small placement. A cigar has to genuinely earn a spot above a Tabernacle around here. Funny how that works out. The cigar in my hand the whole episode ended up being the one everybody was talking about by the end of it.
What Heath Shared With Us
There’s a guy named Heath who joined our Discord about a week ago. Before last night, none of us really knew him. He messaged Eric privately first, almost apologetic about it, asking if it would be okay to share something he’d written a while back, worried about stepping on toes as a brand new member.
What he shared was an essay called “More Than Smoke: The Enduring Culture of the Premium Cigar.” Heath went through a series of severe infections that nearly killed him. He started dialysis. He wrote about the fear of not knowing what his future looked like anymore, and about the cigar community showing up for him when it mattered most. Not just texts asking how he was doing. Guys came to the hospital. Sat with him. Laughed with him. Reminded him he was more than a diagnosis.
Eric read part of it out loud on the show, and the room went quiet in a way I don’t think we’ve experienced before. We’ve talked about dark, weird, and ridiculous things in this garage. We’ve never talked about anything that hit quite like that.
What made it land even harder is that Heath has been here a week. A week. And he trusted us with something that personal, something that real, because somewhere along the way this stopped being a podcast about cigars and started being a place people actually feel at home. If we ever needed a reminder of why we started this, Heath gave it to us without even meaning to.
Stay in the Conversation
If you’ve read this far, you already get what we’re building here. Come see the rest of it for yourself. Subscribe to the Stogie Review YouTube channel, where Smoke and Steel lives every week. If you want to be part of a Discord where a week-old member can share something this honest and get met with nothing but brotherhood, join the Stogie Review Discord. And if you want to help keep this thing running, Troy’s put together some good stuff worth checking out at the Smoke and Steel Merch Store.
