2024 Readers’ Choice Awards: The Winner

The first award of Awards Week 2024 to be given out is not one that we decided. It’s one that you decided. For the second year in a row, we are recognizing a Readers’ Choice Award cigar. It’s the result of a process that began in December when we asked you to nominate cigars. There were more than 2,000 different people who participated in the nominations, producing a list of more than 450 different cigars. The top five cigars were selected as finalists and then we asked you to vote on those five. If you are still reading this: keep scrolling and you’ll find out which cigar won.

Readers’ Choice Award 2024 Cigar: Perdomo 30th Anniversary Maduro

Congrats to the Perdomo Army.

The Perdomo 30th Anniversary was the most nominated cigar, and the 30th Anniversary Maduro was the top wrapper choice amongst the three, though the Sun Grown finished in sixth in the nomination process. As such, it’s no surprise to see it selected as the overall favorite here.

Not only that—as mentioned below—Perdomo was the top answer to the question we asked consumers about which company they smoked the most cigars from during 2024.

Perdomo is an interesting company for halfwheel. Because we focus mostly on new products and because there are many years when Perdomo releases no new products, we don’t write all that much about the company. In terms of the ratio of how many cigars a company makes/sells versus how often we write about it, Perdomo is almost certainly an outlier at the end of the graph. Yet, we’ve long known that Perdomo plays a noticeable role in this industry and Nick Perdomo Jr.’s long history of doing things his own way paid off for this award. The “Perdomo Army,” the nickname given to the company’s fans, made their presence very known.

Final Results

1. Perdomo 30th Anniversary Maduro — 31.1 percent
2. Umbagog Bronzeback — 25.6 percent
3. Diamond Crown Classic — 17.96 percent
4. 601 La Bomba Warhead X — 15.92 percent
5. Underrated — 9.32 percent

Interestingly, these results are very much in line with last year’s winner: Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust’s Mi Querida Black won last year with 31.23 percent of the vote.

Another question that was asked on the survey: Of the cigars you smoked in 2024, I smoked the most amount of cigars from _____.

1. Perdomo — 16.56 percent
2. Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust — 10.85 percent
3. Arturo Fuente — 6.68 percent
4. Espinosa Premium Cigars — 5.65 percent
5. Tatuaje — 5.26 percent

For what it’s worth, sixth place (J.C. Newman) and seventh place (Luciano) mean that all five of the companies who had cigars up for consideration for the Readers’ Choice Awards were in the top seven here.

I haven’t had time to look over the rest of the data, though I will do that in the coming months. Last year’s survey data was helpful to us and is very nice to have for the business side of halfwheel. I am curious as to how many of these people who voted are readers of halfwheel versus people who were sent over by a cigar company promoting themselves. Perhaps the 2025 version of this process will look different, but that’s for another day. We have a big week ahead of us. To all of those who participated, thank you for taking the time.

Here’s the rest of the schedule for Awards Week 2024:

• Jan. 14, 2025 (Tuesday) — Factory of the Year
• Jan. 15, 2025 (Wednesday) — Company of the Year
• Jan. 16, 2025 (Thursday) 12 p.m. CST — Packaging Awards
• Jan. 17, 2025 (Friday) 12 p.m. CST — Top 25 Cigars
• Jan. 20, 2025 (Monday) 12 p.m. CST — The Consensus 2024

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.