Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Alec Bradley Black Market robusto


Have you ever tasted something in a cigar that even you didn't believe you just tasted? You're in the middle of smoking, you take your next draw...wait, did I seriously just taste what I think I did? So you take another draw...yep, still there. That happened to me while I was smoking the Black Market robusto that Alec Bradley cigars generously sent to me (along with 199 other people on Facebook) to promote the launch of this new line of their cigars. More on crazy flavor later.

This cigar has a wonderful dark brown, if slightly mottled, appearance. The stick comes packaged with a paper sleeve that covers half of the cigar from the middle all the way down to the foot. Upon removing the sleeve, we're left with a very thin band in the middle of the cigar. The wrapper has a very common tobacco and barnyard aroma. This aroma is also present on the foot, but a little stronger. I used my new Shuriken cutter on this stogie and promptly lit up. I guess I was too excited to try it and missed out on taking a cold draw.

Immediately after lighting I was greeted with a pleasantly mild bodied, nearly medium flavor of woodiness, cedar, a nuttiness (which I could have sworn was almond) and a slight, barely there bitterness. Toward the end of the first 3rd the flavors became predominantly leathery with some pepper spice. The pepper continued well into the second 3rd and was joined, also, by...some kind of berry flavor (?). This is what made me sit up and try to put my finger on what I was tasting. It was brief but unmistakeable. Some kind of berry flavor...I want to say blackberry but I'm really not sure. Possibly a combination of berries. I tasted it once, went back for more, and it was still there. I couldn't believe it. Then the final 3rd of the smoke brough me the flavors I expected to taste at the beginning. There was milk chocolate, graham cracker, caramel, toffee and an earthiness that I was surprised didn't come sooner. Throughout the cigar the draw had a slight resistence, which was good. The burn left a little to be desired and took some work to keep it even, but very little relighting.

Overall, this cigar was pretty complex. It was a good cigar, but a faint bitterness that underlined the experience indicates to me that it would have benefitted from 6 months or so in my humidor. That bitterness didn't really ruin the experience, it just, at times, distracted from all the other flavors that were there. If you like a good maduro, and particularly if you've liked a lot of other lines that Alec Bradley has come out with, I would say you should definitely try this. But if you go out and buy some Black Market, get 2 or 3. Smoke one right away, putting the others in humidification, and take some notes on the first one. Then wait several months to smoke any others you picked up and note the differences. I'm very curious to see what will happen when I try this.

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