HVC La Rosa 520 Rare of Rare Begins Shipping

Nearly a year after the cigar was announced, HVC’s first U.S.-made cigar is finally shipping to stores.

The HVC La Rosa 520 Rare of Rare is made at El Titan de Bronze in Miami, the first time HVC Cigars has worked with the factory. It’s also the first time the company has worked with Dominican tobacco and medio tiempo tobacco. It’s offered in a single 6 x 52 belicoso size that uses an Ecuadorian Sumatran wrapper over an Ecuadorian habano binder and the fillers include Dominican criollo 98 and medio tiempo grown in Estelí, Nicaragua.

It has an MSRP of $20 per cigar and is limited to 500 boxes of 10 cigars.

HVC announced the cigar during the 2022 TPE trade show in late January. It was originally scheduled to ship in March.

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. Previously, that tobacco was typically classified as ligero.