Skip Martin used to smoke a lot of La Flor Dominicana Double Ligeros and Joya de Nicaragua Antanos. While CroMagnon embodies, some of those traits—Martin was still waiting. The answer comes in RoMa Craft Tobac’s fifth regular production line, Neaderthal.

“Neanderthal is the blend I had in mind when we started working on CroMagnon,” said Martin, a co-founder of both RoMa Craft Tobac and the associated Fabrica de Tabacos NicaSueño S.A. factory. “The truth is, I did not have the experience or skill to make this cigar in 2009.”

The cigar will debut in one size, a 5 x 52/56 figurado with a flat cap. It features a Mexican San Andrés wrapper, Connecticut broadleaf binder and a variety of Nicaraguan fillers, including those from Condega, Estelí, Jalapa and Pueblo Nuevo, as well as Dominican olor ligero. There is also Pennsylvania double ligero, nicknamed Green River Sucker One, an ultra-strong ligero Martin says was crucial to the blend.

“It wasn’t until I found the Pennsylvania Double Ligero, a regrowth leaf with two to three times the nicotine levels of our other tobaccos, that I had the components I needed to produce what I was looking for.”

A regrowth leaf emerges when the leaves are cut off of a plant and a second set of leaves grows on the plant before it is removed from the ground.

Pricing is set at $12 and the cigar is sold in cabinets of 50, which is expected to ship in October. RoMa Craft Tobac will debut the cigar at the 2014 IPCPR convention and trade show, where the cigar will be pre-sold. 

“We are frequently recognized for having a lot of value, quality at a particular price point, in our cigar this remains true for the Neanderthal,” said Martin. “This is definitely a quality over quantity cigar. We wanted to come in under the $10 mark, but in the end this is a complicated cigar to make, it requires a lot of expensive and hard to find tobaccos to produce and the aging process takes almost 6 months and we decided to go with the blend we believed in.”

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Charlie Minato

I am an editor and co-founder of halfwheel.com/Rueda Media, LLC. I previously co-founded and published TheCigarFeed, one of the two predecessors of halfwheel. I have written about the cigar industry for more than a decade, covering everything from product launches to regulation to M&A. In addition, I handle a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff here at halfwheel. I enjoy playing tennis, watching boxing, falling asleep to the Le Mans 24, wearing sweatshirts year-round and eating gyros. echte liebe.