Ask halfwheel: Why Don’t You Review More Cigars

Welcome back to Ask halfwheel—our weekly segment where we answer questions from readers.

Today’s question comes from Hunter:

If I had a question it would be, “why do you do very few cigar reviews”. I understand how long and tedious it can be reviewing cigars but I would love to see much more. Being you have 4 main cigar smokers here I think you could do 1 or 2 a day. Even if they are small reviews! For example: I’ve read every fuente review more than 3 times. Simply because they are great! However, it would be awesome to do reviews like OpusX batch 2014-2015-2016 of various sizes to see how years compete. And more across the board reviews such a more sizes. I find there are mostly rare, htf, and odd cigars rather than the common cigar most people shop for. I think you guys would get ALOT more hits.

Interestingly, I was actually having a conversation with a cigar manufacturer about a topical almost identical to this when Hunter submitted this question.

I think the place to start with Hunter’s question is actually the last part. Yes, there are a lot of rare, hard-to-find and odd cigars. That’s a carry over from Smoking Stogie, one of the precursor sites to halfwheel. For the first few years of the site, we actually only reviewed those cigars, along with prerelease cigars, but we changed that last year.

Now we generally review new cigars with a bit of limited edition and vintage cigars, but it’s largely due to a question that Patrick Lagreid raised a few years ago: what’s the goal of the site’s reviews? As it turns out, our goal is to provide a snapshot of the modern cigar market, one where there are over 1,200 new SKUs added annually. We can’t review everything, but we try to have a decent chunk of the pie with a bit of emphasis on the parts we find more interesting.

A cigar manufacturer recently asked us why we only review one vitola of a line when it launches, here was my response to him:

Adapting a model where we review multiple vitolas from a single line leads to one of four solutions in my mind:

A. We review less overall cigars

Even if we adapt to say two vitolas per review and modified it down from smoking three samples to two, I think we’d lose a review per week. That means we would only get to around 230 cigars per year (we will review around 325 cigars this year, minus 45 or so redux reviews, minus another 50 reviews that we would cancel as part of the change).

I’ll admit that 230 vs. 280 isn’t a huge difference, but I don’t think that really addresses your complaint and I most certainly would not stand by “we adequately reviewed this line” only reviewing two of the 3-6 vitolas that most lines debut in.

I think to do that we would, at the minimum, need to go to three vitolas per review, which means another lost day, which means 180 or so reviews, or about one line per year from every cigar company that goes to IPCPR. (There were 151 of them at IPCPR 2014 by our count.)

B. We only review one sample per vitola

I really like the fact that we review more than one sample as it acknowledges that inconsistencies happen, something that can only be pointed out if the same reviewer smokes multiple cigars. I think going to the one sample and done method opens up a new set of problems, one that I would argue is bigger, than the problem it solves. I can tell you the cigar I’m smoking now is not relating much to the one I smoked yesterday, even though they came from the same box.

C. We get a whole bunch more reviewers

This is the least likely, yet perhaps best way to address your criticism.

Our reviewers have basically been the same since the site started and I think that adds to consistency. As we’ve found out with the beer blog, we got really lucky to have the four of us on the cigar site. We are all willing to be honest, we all are willing to do review cigars weekly, etc. Adding three more reviewers means 40 percent of the reviews of the site are coming from new faces, which at best would be a rocky transition. I think in all likelihood, we would see some people start and then quit, etc. That (in)stability is not something I’m wiling to sign off on at the moment.

D. We set number of reviews per company and see what happens

This is the easiest, but I don’t think it solves the problem. It also raises the question for a company that releases say two regular production lines. If we only allot Altadis U.S.A. six reviews, do we review five vitolas from one line, one limited edition and then ignore the rest of its new items for the year? I think this could potentially solve your complaint, although it doesn’t guarantee us solving it.

That being said, Hunter seems to have a solution, why don’t we do quicker, shorter reviews.

The answer is because we think that our reviews—with their completeness and as such their length—serve a purpose. Our goal is to give you some background on the cigar, occasionally some interesting tidbits and our honest thoughts on the cigar itself. Doing this, at least in our minds, involves smoking more than one cigar.

Shortening the reviews to one to two cigars smoked would certainly introduce our readers to a lot more cigars, but it would also lead to a significant increase in commenters arguing “if you smoked more than one cigar, you would have found…” And they would be right. Not a week goes by when one of the six reviews posted on the site shows a drastic inconsistency between at least one of the samples smoke for a review and the other two.

In my mind, the idea of a singular person smoking multiple cigars to formulate an (honest) evaluation is perhaps the most important part of the halfwheel review system.

Brooks Whittington has often argued that perhaps we add shorter reviews to the mixture of reviews we currently do, not entirely replace the long review format. I think that significantly devalues the normal reviews. It would also lead to a lot of interesting decisions: is a cigar eligible for the top 25 if only one sample was smoked? If the answer is yes—what about the times in which we smoke three samples and one or even two score 91, but the third does not? If the answer is no—do we then do a full review just to make it eligible? There would be manufacturers complaining about why they were a quick review versus a full review.

But perhaps the main issue is that we collectively don’t smoke every day. I try to take at least one day off per week to let my palate recover. We also generally don’t smoke more than 1-2 cigars per day when we do. Sure, there are nights when I’m at a cigar shop for five hours, but I certainly don’t follow that up with a cigar on my patio at 7 a.m. the next morning.

There are a lot of comments made about the, occasionally bizarre, flavor descriptions found in cigars. I’d argue that we actually aren’t too different from some of our magazine counterparts. Regardless, those flavor descriptions and even many of the more pedestrian ones are not things that can be found when I am smoking 4-5 cigars per day for a week consecutively.

(See Point C above for why we won’t add more reviewers)

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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.