PCA 2023: Esteban Carreras

While the PCA Convention & Trade Show brings a number of surprises, it also comes with a fair amount of consistency. Case in point: Esteban Carreras. As we start checking in with companies about what they have in store for the show, I will email Craig Cunningham or possibly run into him somewhere, and he will tell me the same thing: there will be a new, regular production line, it will be ready to ship at the show, and he won’t tell me anything about it until I stop by the booth.

This year was no exception.

Beyond the mechanics of our conversation, the company’s booth has also remained largely unchanged in the years that I’ve been covering the company. Located in the “middle” of the show floor, a term I use somewhat loosely but which makes sense given their location, it has a number of display spaces for both the company’s new products and its existing lines. Like a handful of other companies, Esteban Carreras puts its new line in the same spot of the booth every year.

What made this year particularly interesting was that I walked by the spot where those new products are, saw some cigars in boxes that had a familiar name, and kept walking, only to eventually find Cunningham and ask where the new line was, which is when he led me to his new spin on Taken From the Devil’s Hand.

Esteban Carreras Taken From the Devil’s Hand Corojo Maduro 

At the 2022 PCA Convention & Trade Show, the company released Taken From the Devil’s Hand, a line that gets its name from how a particular seed made its way out of Cuba. Gonzalo Puentes, who runs Esteban Carreras’ factory, once worked for Cuba’s Ministry of Agriculture, specifically the group responsible for tobacco production. As the story is told, Puentes and his colleagues were tasked with developing improved corojo seeds, so they used positive selection to select the strongest plants; for example, start with 100 plants, take the seeds from the best five, plant those seeds, and repeat a few times. Except instead of giving the best seeds to the government, they were kept and smuggled out of the country, while less desirable seeds were handed over. Thus, they had taken the crop from the devil—Fidel Castro—and his regime.

The work on this line began about three years ago, as shortly after the original line went into production, Cunningham and his team began working with the corojo wrapper to give it extra fermentation, “low and slow” as Cunningham put it as the leaf can’t take high heat. The result is a profile that is more complex and spicier than its predecessor. It’s also more limited in availability, though it will be an ongoing release.

• Wrapper: Ecuador (Corojo Maduro)
• Binder: Nicaragua
• Filler: Nicaragua

• Esteban Carreras Taken From the Devil’s Hand Corojo Maduro Boolit (4 3/4 x 46) — $8 (Box of 32, $256)
• Esteban Carreras Taken From the Devil’s Hand Corojo Maduro Toro (6 x 50) — $11.50 (Box of 20, $230)
• Esteban Carreras Taken From the Devil’s Hand Corojo Maduro Sixty (6 x 60) — $13 (Box of 20, $260)

Production: Regular Production

Release Date: July 2023