CroMagnon Clovis Slated for April

Next year, RoMa Craft Tobac will unveil an updated version of its CroMagnon line with a new blend and updated packaging. The original CroMagnon may return at some point, but the company’s focus will be on the updated CroMagnon line, which will feature a Pennsylvania broadleaf wrapper instead of the Connecticut broadleaf that has been used for CroMagnon since its launch in 2011.

Those changes will extend to the regular production vitolas of CroMagnon—the 2024 RoMa Craft price list shows the same seven regular production vitolas for the Pennsylvania version as the Connecticut version—and also the limited production vitolas. There are four limited production cigars listed for the Pennsylvania blend, three of which are not new: Blockhead (6 x 54), Gran Perfecto (5 5/8 x 60) and Mastodon (4 1/2 x 60).

There’s one new name: CroMagnon Clovis.

Clovis is the CroMagnon Black Irish but in the new blend. Like Black Irish, it’s a version of the 5 x 56 EMH size, but with a barber pole wrapper design that uses Ecuadorian candela tobacco as an accent. The internal blend will be the same as the updated CroMagnon blend: a Sumatra hybrid binder and fillers from the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.

The MSRP is set at $13.15 per cigar, and 2024 production is limited to 500 boxes of 24 cigars. Clovis is expected to ship in April.

Clovis references the Clovis culture, which existed around 11,000 BCE in North America. At one point, it was believed that Clovis people were the first humans in Americas though that is now disputed.

Earlier this year, Skip Martin, co-founder of RoMa Craft Tobac, told halfwheel that the company was changing the blend of CroMagnon because it has been unable to consistently purchase Connecticut broadleaf wrappers that meet the company’s standards for CroMagnon. As such, the Connecticut broadleaf-wrapped CroMagnon has not been in production since mid-2022 and was removed from the price list in early 2023.

Martin left open the possibility of making the original CroMagnon blend in the future, including even moving production to a factory that has better access to Connecticut broadleaf, but said that in order to make CroMagnon, the blend needed to change.

The updated blend is scheduled to debut at select accounts in February with the release of the new CroMagnon Timeline, a 6 1/4 x 50 toro that uses a 109-style cap, i.e. a parejo shape that has a slightly tapered head. This will be the second release for Timeline, which the company first released in 2016 using the original CroMagnon blend to celebrate its 5th anniversary. A full release of the updated CroMagnon blend will occur around the 2024 PCA Convention & Trade Show in late March.