The most expensive thing in my humidor turned out to be the best thing in my humidor, which is the least interesting possible outcome, and it happened anyway.
Last week I asked you about the cigar you expected nothing from. The underdog. The one with the cartoon band that outsmoked the stuff I paid real money for. Then I went out on the deck and the blue chip won.
The E.P. Carrillo Pledge Prequel. $22.99 at Broadway Cigar, a box-pressed 5x50 robusto that Cigar Aficionado named its number one cigar of 2020. It arrived pre-approved. It is exactly what a guy four months into this buys when he wants somebody else to tell him what is good, and I have been quietly embarrassed about owning it.
Sara and I were out there over an hour. It got cold the way September in Portland does, right after the sun drops behind the neighbor's trees. I peeled the band off and kept going, and then kept going past the point where that was a good idea, until it was too hot to hold. 4.5 in the log. Ties the best things I have ever smoked, and it is the only one on that list I would have felt sheepish recommending.
I still cannot tell you what it tasted like in the vocabulary people use for this, and I said last week I would not try. What I can stand behind: I did not put it down, and I burned my fingers finding that out.
the part I got wrong
Two weeks ago I wrote a rule into my own spreadsheet, in capital letters, feeling very pleased with myself: guillotine every box press.
I thought I had earned it. Same cigar, same box, three days apart. V-cut, it was a 3.5 and pulled like a straw with a kink in it. Cut flat with the guillotine, 4.5 and I ordered more. Clean little experiment. Case closed.
Except the Pledge is a box press too, and I V-cut it, and it was perfect.
The difference is not the tool. On the bad one I ran the V across the skinny face of the press, which is the smallest opening that cutter can physically make. On the Pledge I ran it down through the wide section instead. Same cutter, same shape of cigar, opposite result. The variable was never box press versus round. It was which way I was pointing the thing.
Which is a worse rule and a better one. Worse because "guillotine every box press" was tidy and I liked saying it. Better because it is true, and because it means the good cut was there the whole time and I blamed the cigar.
or maybe it just sat there
Here is the other fact I cannot separate out. I bought that Pledge on July 17 and smoked it on September 7. 52 days in the humidor, the longest rest in the log by a wide margin, and I only got there by forgetting about it.
So: did it win because it was expensive? Or because it sat in a box for seven weeks while I finally pointed a cutter at it correctly? Sample size of one, no way to pull those apart. That is the honest state of roughly everything I know about this so far.
I had two of them. I have zero. That is the review.
