Cigar prices vary greatly. While many manufacturers would have you believe it’s due to the cost of the tobacco, premium or not, that’s not necessarily true. Hundreds of hours go into making the average cigar with nearly 300 or more hands involved from seed to store shelves. Every cigar operation big to small is structured in this way, and the cigar-making process is very traditional and hands-on. There’s not much automation behind it all.
Something from Davidoff, for example, comes from the same fields, the same type of tobacco, and the same hands as any other brand. So, why is it considered a premium?
A premium cigar is crafted to offer quality over quantity. That doesn’t mean premium cigars aren’t mass-produced, the reality is quite the contrary. But, for the most part, you shouldn’t ever have a poor experience with a premium cigar, and if you do, it’s the exception rather than the rule. In other words, smoking or experiential problems should be rare.
That experience, from cutting the cigar to lighting it up, makes it a premium-grade offering. Right down to the flavors you taste when you smoke, how it burns, whether or not you have draw issues, and how you feel as you’re smoking it.
That being said, I think it’s fairly obvious that a cheap, no-name bundle cigar will be a very different experience than a $30 cigar from a premium or boutique brand. What about a $30 cigar versus a $75 cigar? Or, a $100 cigar versus a $15 cigar?
Is a $100 cigar worth it?
Source: Briley Kenney / The BS Lounge
In my opinion, no, a $100 cigar is not worth it, unless you have money to blow. And because some people do have money to blow on a cigar that price, the real answer is subjective. It’s all about preference.
A $5 cigar, made to be cheap, is certainly going to offer a unique experience, probably sub-par to a $15 or $20 cigar. Anything above $10 tends to be held to a higher standard. Cigars in the range of $20 to $30 are somewhat pricey for the average smoker, but still worth it.
Anything above $50, even $100 or above, is made with the same tobacco, the same methods, and by the same people as the cheaper options. The biggest difference from cigar to cigar is the blend of tobacco used inside, usually crafted by master blenders. That blend — made up of the fillers, binder, and wrapper — is what gives every cigar its unique flavor profile.
Since a flavor profile, or the blend, is more indicative of the tobacco used inside, it’s not correlated to cost. At least not in the way you might think. Moreover, several big tobacco growers and suppliers sell their tobacco to other companies for use in their cigars — including some of the biggest brands on the market. That means there’s a regular mixture or influx of tobacco used across brands and labels, and exclusivity is rarer than one might think.
That’s all to say, a $100 cigar is probably made with the same tobacco as many $20 or $30 cigars. It’s rolled the same way, by the same people, probably even within the same factories. There’s a lot of collaboration and community in the cigar industry that’s not often talked about. Aganorsa and Plasencia, for instance, supply a ton of tobacco to other brands.
Tying it all together, most $100 cigars are made the same way, with the same tobacco, by the same people as something that costs $12 to $30. The tobacco used inside is the same, as well. Some premium cigars may use aged tobacco that has been aged or fermented longer than usual. If that’s the case, the experience really will be different.
But otherwise, smoking a $100 cigar is no different than smoking a $15 or $20 cigar that you really love. It’s all preference and relies on the experience.
Does that mean you shouldn’t buy or smoke $100+ cigars? No. That’s all up to you. It’s all up to how much you want to spend and what kind of experience you want to have. Besides, if you go to a high-end lounge that’s jacking up the price of your average cigar, you’ll probably spend that much anyway.
Just don’t do that unless you have the money. There are far better cigars that will offer a comparable experience at a more reasonable price point.
Briley has over 16 years in the publishing and content marketing business. He's been writing about cigars for nearly half that in various forms. What makes him a tour de force is he also smokes them.
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Source: Briley Kenney / The BS Lounge
Source: Mohd Jon Ramlan / Unsplash
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