Announcing Readers’ Choice Awards 2023

What’s your cigar of the year?

If you are in cigar media, it’s the question of this time of year. Nearly every cigar blog, magazine, YouTube channel, podcast, etc. answers the question this time of year. In addition to answering the question, we’re actually going to ask you: what’s your cigar of the year?

From Dec. 4-25, you can fill out the form below to submit your nominations. During the last week of the year, we will count the results, take the top five (or so) nominations and then let you, the readers, vote on them.

This will be a two-step process, and it’s also being done for two different reasons.

1. We are curious about what our readers think was the best cigar for 2023. Also, what’s the second best, etc. In many ways, this likely devolves into a popularity contest, but even that data point will be interesting and useful for us at halfwheel. Perhaps there’s a cigar our readers loved that we haven’t reviewed yet, perhaps a particular brand does really well in nominations, etc.
2. The second round, the voting part, will involve asking you about 10 questions. This won’t just be to vote on what cigar you think is the best, but also which company most impressed you and also a brief survey about your cigar smoking. For example, are you someone who works in the cigar industry or a consumer? How many cigars do you smoke a week?

Being completely transparent with you: there are a lot of reasons why we are doing this. I had this idea after we got repeated requests from our advertisers about what percentage of our readers are in the cigar industry. I don’t know how accurately this will answer that question, but it’s a start. It’s also a way for us to try to engage with our readers more, something we need to be doing more.

All of that said, I’m more curious to see what you, the readers, have to say than I am for the results of The Consensus. I’m genuinely interested and don’t have much of a clue of what you’ll say. So with that, submit your answers below or go to halfwheel.com/vote.

Some details:

• Feel free to answer this question however you’d like. The best cigar, your favorite cigar, the cigar you smoked the most of, etc.
• People who work in the cigar industry can participate. We aren’t going to ask for your name, email, etc.
• Nominations are open between Dec. 4-25, 2023.
• Voting will take place Jan. 1-12, 2024.
• You don’t need to participate in both the nominations and voting.
• Please only nominate once. We will be filtering out multiple votes from the same IP address.