The Cigar I Smoke When No One Is Watching

People assume that someone who runs a cigar company smokes only the rarest leaves. The truth is more honest.

When no one is watching, when there is no client to impress and no review to write, I reach for an Arturo Fuente Hemingway Short Story. It costs about eleven dollars. It takes thirty minutes. It is, top to bottom, one of the most consistently excellent cigars made anywhere in the world, and it has been for forty years.

The great cigars do not need to be expensive. They need to be made by people who care, with leaf that has been given time, in factories that have not lost the thread. The Hemingway Short Story is all of those things in a perfeccion shape that fits in a coat pocket.

Most evenings, that is enough.

— Eric Schleien