Aladino Candela Begins Shipping

JRE Tobacco Co. has announced that it has begun shipping the new Aladino Candela.

The company is selling the Aladino Candela in just one size, a 5 x 50 robusto, and only shipping 8,000 cigars as part of what it is considering a trial run. The blend is made entirely of Honduran tobaccos with the green candela wrapper covering a corojo binder and corojo fillers. Each cigar has an MSRP of $8.50, and there are just 400 boxes of 20 cigars available.

Furthermore, it is only shipping the cigar to 32 stores. As JRE Tobacco Co. has done in the past, these 32 stores are ones that have visited the company’s fields and factory in Honduras. If the response is positive, the Aladino Candela could get a large release in the future.

“We would like to push the candela wrapper’s popularity as a homage to my grandfather Julio since he was the largest candela grower in the 80s and 90s when candela was the dominant wrapper in the industry,” said Vivi Eiroa in an email to halfwheel.

Candela refers to a process that produces the green-colored cigars that always get more visible this time of year due to St. Patrick’s Day. Sometimes the cigars end up very green-looking, other times they can be a tan color with a green hint. Whatever the shade, candela is the result of a process, and not a varietal of tobacco such as criollo or habano. In order to create candela tobacco, the tobacco is heated in a specialized barn at much higher temperatures than other tobaccos. The idea is to heat the tobacco by incrementally increasing the temperature which removes the moisture from the leaves. Eventually, the moisture is removed, and the leaves become dry but are green because the chlorophyll hasn’t been removed, something that happens with the slower process that the vast majority of tobacco used for premium cigars goes through, and which results in the light tan to dark brown colors of those leaves.

Many decades ago, candela was the most common wrapper found on cigars in the U.S., though at this point it’s closer to a novelty than a fad. For tobacco growers and cigar makers, candela has one major advantage: time. The whole process of heating the tobacco takes less than a week and the tobacco requires far less processing once it heads to factories.