Blog: On the Collections, and Serie Vs

Regular readers of halfwheel are probably familiar with the Collections.

It describes our ever-growing library of cigar lines that we keep to photograph in order to show the history of a particular line. It’s stored in a large cabinet humidor at our office—which we refer to as the Collections—and there’s about 60 or so lines that have been posted on the site so far, but there’s actually many lines that are incomplete and such not posted.

We spend a bit of time and money tracking down the missing cigars, as well as keeping up with new vitolas in order to preserve the current status of any given line and from time to time we manage to complete one. Most of the time it quietly goes up on the site—you can view an updated list of what’s on the site by clicking the “COLLECTIONS” tab under MISCELLANEOUS in the menubar or going here—or within a review.

It’s an interesting concept because it’s nearing a thousand cigars that are essentially rotting away in the name of being able to provide history. All four members of the site are big believers in buying cigars to smoke them, not to collect them, although we think the Collections serves its purpose.

Despite the time we spend working on acquiring, maintaining, photographing and editing the Collections, it’s a somewhat hidden feature of halfwheel. So I thought it would make sense to explain a bit, while also introducing our most ambitious Collections shot to date.

The Oliva Serie V is one of a few personal cigars for me. It’s not something that I honestly enjoy outside of a few vitolas, but it’s arguably the cigar that got me interested in cigars. I still find excellence just before the midpoint of the Churchill Extra, which was honestly too much for my novice self to handle a handful of years ago, and the mythical Culebra is worthy of all the hype, and then some. Over time, I’ve smoked a lot of the weirder releases under the line, but within the last year it became a side project for me to be able to be able to post a full Serie V collections shot.

Thanks to a few lucky purchases and a couple of really generous people at Oliva and its Dutch distributor, Longfiller Company, we managed to get all of them. All 37 Serie V, Serie V Maduro Especials, Serie V Melanio and Serie V Melanio Maduros. Or so I think. When I asked a few people at Oliva, there were some Serie Vs they left off their complete lists and there very easily could be a few more. As always, the photograph above was shot by Brooks Whittington and I’m responsible for the information.

If you know of one that’s missing, please leave a comment. Just a note, there are some releases that were released multiple different times, we just listed it in its first known commercial appearance. If not click here to see the Serie Vs, including a list of release year and production status.