My Cigar Blog

Units of Value

Part of the Rehman Rashid series of reviews

GIRDING my loins and all associated body parts to spend another several thousand ringgit on cigars (as a means both of celebrating the release of my retirement funds and anticipating a time when I will have spent the lot on cigars) I find that I have subconsciously adopted a new unit of personal currency – The Cg (pronounced “Cg”), present exchange rate c.RM70/USD20/EUR15.

We aren’t rich, you see. We are (or have been) mostly working stiffs: wage-earners and salarymen, slaves to the machine, grist to the mill, corporate drones building hives more than making honey, protected against our lives’ quiet desperation by the great & good institution of the Employees’ Provident Fund, God bless them.

We smoke cigars not as accessories enabling the flash of a Lange & Sohne and lacquered cufflinks on the wrist below an Esplendido, but to impart to the mundane toil and struggle of our lives occasional moments of grace.

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The Penultimate Dilemma

Part of the Rehman Rashid series of reviews

IN a corner of the humidor were two Cohiba Siglo VIes from a 2005 box of 25; back from when they were rolled with flat butts. They were no longer lion-tawny as they had been when the box lid first slid open. They had acquired the look and colour of polished mahogany.
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Waiting to Retrohale

Retrohaling

Part of the Rehman Rashid series of reviews

AT Kuala Lumpur‘s chi-chi Q-Bar five or more years ago, during the first incarnation of his estimable cigar blog, our esteemed host Aizuddin photographed me exhaling cigar smoke through my nostrils and captioned the pic: “How does Rehman blow the smoke out through his nose?” He couldn’t do it then; I wonder if by now he’s figured out the Art of the Retrohale.

For that is what they call it, according to the herfboards. When you take cigar smoke into your mouth, send it up through the back of your buccal cavity through your nasal passages and out your nostrils into the general atmosphere, you’re “retrohaling”.

It came naturally to me but not to Aiz, and I fear there is only one reason for this: he doesn’t smoke cigarettes and I do. Of course, there’s no inhalation of cigar smoke. (I once broke up with a girlfriend partly because of her insistence that “real” cigar smokers inhale. It may seem petty, but a moment’s thought would reveal the deep incompatibilities indicated.)

Simply by exhaling through your nostrils with your mouth closed, the venturi effect of the air escaping your lungs will carry the smoke through your nasal passages, causing one of two effects: immediately tearing eyes and a coughing and/or sneezing fit, or an incomparable melding of the fragrance of the smoke in your nose with its taste in your mouth, accompanied by a jolt of nicotine absorbed directly through the sinuses into the frontal lobes of the brain.

Cigarette smokers such as myself may find smoking merely with the mouth unsatisfying. It leaves out what for us retrohalers is fully half the experience. Once the cigar gets to its end, the density and power of the smoke may make retrohaling too harsh. All the way there, however, I find it impossible NOT to retrohale.

I also think it looks pretty cool, no matter what my ex-girlfriend thought.

Puros Indios Forever!

Part of the Rehman Rashid series of reviews

THERE are but three things the Internet is good for:

1. Information retrieval;

2. Interpersonal communication; and,

3. Buying and selling stuff.

All three synergise most harmoniously for cigar smokers. Were it not for the WWWeb, non-Cuban cigars would surely not constitute half my personal stash of cherished cigars.

In the most plangent irony of the international world of cigars, residents of the United States still cannot legally do business in Cuban cigars on their territory. Hence, the past half-century of the Cuban embargo has seen the rise and rise of cigar manufacturing in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and elsewhere.

With the huge US market as a driver, there’s no doubting the heights of quality non-Cuban cigars have reached in recent decades. Still, the best of the rest can rival the best, but the best of the best are Cuban, and it was cause for a certain smugness that, for all their global dominance as the unitary superpower, the Yanks couldn’t get the Habanos we could.

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Wicked Pleasure

Part of the Rehman Rashid series of reviews

I WAS about a third through a Partagas 898 when my brother had to go to the bathroom to throw up. He had to go twice more before I was done with the lonsdale. (Like hell I’d extinguish it; I’m the elder. Besides, it was his fault for not having sufficient ventilation in his kitchen.)

My brother thinks cigars are evil. I was prepared to concede with regard to the particular smoke that made him vomit. It was the second-last of a box bought duty-free in Langkawi, and probably the second-last of its kind I will ever smoke. Oh, it’s a Partagas all right — its flavours would not disappoint any fan of the brand. But these were rolled tight as drumsticks and drew firm and hard; no “give” at all to them, even after three years’ storage.

So they took an inordinately long time to finish, which the rich brawn of Partagas forbade me hastening. This was wretched for my brother, who will forever hold that cigars are evil and enjoyed only by the wicked. The quintessential cigar smoker was Al Capone.

Sigmund Freud was a closet sex fiend. Winston Churchill was a manic-depressive whose seven-stick-a-day habit Freud would have interpreted very differently had Churchill not won World War Two and had a vitola of Romeo y Julieta named after him.

Rudyard Kipling was a misogynistic white supremacist. Fidel Castro‘s a commie and Groucho was obviously Marxist. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are punchlines. And so on.

Oh I say, I said, steady on old boy. But he was too nauseous to consider how sublime, subtle and nuanced, how transcendent and ethereal, the experience of a good cigar could be. A cigar soothes and calms. Its voluptuary flavours evoke the emotions of great cuisine or fine wine; it is a gustatory, gastronomic experience, and assuredly non-fattening.

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