H. Upmann 180th Anniversary Shipping Next Week

On Monday, July 29, Altadis U.S.A. will release two cigars that celebrate the 180th anniversary of the founding of one of the most influential cigar brands in history: H. Upmann.

The H. Upmann 180th Anniversary is offered in two sizes, though most will only see a 7 x 50 Churchill. It is made by AJ Fernandez in Nicaragua and uses only Nicaraguan tobacco, including a medio tiempo wrapper. Medio tiempo is a priming of tobacco—the way a plant is divided into sections vertically—that is found above the ligero priming, typically the highest priming. It’s only found on certain plans and only some growers go through the effort of classifying it separately from ligero. Given its position on the plant, if a plant has medio tiempo tobacco growing on it, that tobacco should be the strongest tobacco from that plant. In recent years, a variety of manufacturers have marketed their cigars as explicitly containing medio tiempo tobacco. Oftentimes that tobacco was typically classified as ligero.

It has an MSRP of $22.50 per cigar and is limited to 5,000 boxes of 10 cigars.

There’s a more limited—and expensive—H. Upmann 180th Anniversary Toro (6 x 50) that is only sold in humidors. Each humidor will come with 50 toros and carries a price tag of $1,500. There were just 180 numbered humidors made.

At 23, Herman Upmann left his native Germany to work at an import/export company in the New World, eventually landing in Cuba. In 1844, he purchased a cigar factory in Havana, which not only grew to be one of the largest in the world but also was credited with being the first factory to affix labels to individual cigars, or what we now call cigar bands.

Habanos S.A., which sells the Cuban H. Upmann in non-American markets, has not announced an explicitly 180th anniversary cigar for H. Upmann, though the 2024 Edición Limitada class includes the new Magnum Finite. AJ Fernandez also produced the H. Upmann 175th Anniversary, which also used medio tiempo tobacco for the wrapper. According to Altadis U.S.A, the two blends are different.