halfwheel

Icons of Cigars™ —Jonathan Drew

Our final Icons of Cigars™ portrait from our trip to Cigar Safari in Nicaragua is Jonathan Drew of Drew Estate. As you may or may not recall, we had photographed J.D. before, last year at the IPCPR show, but I was looking for something a bit different out of this trip. It seems to me that [...]

Icons of Cigars™ — Willy Herrera

Formally of El Titan de Bronze, Willy Herrera officially joined Drew Estate almost exactly one year ago. He has been working nonstop since that time, blending tobacco into his first release for Drew Estate, which should be ready to be introduced at the IPCPR show next month. Honestly, when Charlie and I were at the Cigar [...]

Icons of Cigars™ — Steve Saka

While at the Drew Estate factory for Cigar Safari about three weeks ago, I decided to try and get portraits of all of the major players at Drew Estate for our Icons of Cigars™ project. They will be running for the next three weeks on Monday. First up is Steve Saka, President of Drew Estate. [...]

A Visit to La Gran Fabrica Drew Estate

Editor’s Note: As you know, Brooks and I were amongst many bloggers invited down to Drew Estate a few weeks ago. Both Brooks and I brought our cameras, he used his (fortunately) and I didn’t, again, fortunately. On a personal note, there are very  few halfwheel posts I actually have anticipation towards seeing, this is [...]

Blog: Our Newest Sponsor — Defeat Prop 29

Today our newest sponsor’s ad appeared on the website, No on Prop 29. Proposition 29 is a ballot measure in California that will raise the state’s OTP tax to 54.89%, one of the highest in the nation. The ballot measures goes before a public vote on June 5. We’ve previously covered efforts from the IPCPR [...]

Blog: Welcoming Brian Burt

Before I welcome the newest member of halfwheel, we unfortunately are sad to say farewell to another. Charlie “Ray” Stahl, who wrote alongside me at TheCigarFeed from that publication’s modest start in June of 2010, is stepping aside at halfwheel. While Stahl never published an article at halfwheel, he was a key part of the [...]

Accessory Reviews

Today we posted our first halfwheel accessory review, although in fairness, one of the reviews from Smoking Stogie did make it over. Accessory reviews will be a monthly tradition on halfwheel, although I won’t say it’s always going to be the last day of the month. Unlike our cigar reviews, we won’t be scoring the [...]

Introducing the Blog

A blog starting a blog. It’s a bit confusing, but it’s all in a name. This isn’t about trying to shed the cigar blog moniker, because we are a cigar blog. Rather, we needed something where we could informally communicate site news, thoughts and other things that don’t really fit into a category. So we [...]

The Consensus: 2011 Awards

For the 2010 rendition of this concept, click here to see Brian Hewitt’s work. Before anyone starts, I started this long before Bill Berris posted his rendition of this a few days at Cigar Snapshot. (Bill’s serves as a interesting sample of this, although there are noticeable differences beyond population size.) The concept was simple, [...]

don’t reinvent the wheel

What just happened? Don’t worry, I share that feeling as well. Before any readers start freaking out about the loss of SmokingStogie or TheCigarFeed, we thought it might be a good idea to explain why we shut down both sites. So without further ado, an introduction to halfwheel. Every cigar blog starts with the same [...]