RoMa Craft’s Maestranza Shipping Next Week

RoMa Craft Tobac’s new Maestranza line will go on sale for the first time next week. That sentence was copied and pasted from a story from two months ago and yet, once again is true.

In July, RoMa Craft Tobac shipped the first release of Maestranza to stores, but next week, the company will ship the actual Maestranza cigars for the first time. It was always meant this way.

Maestranza is the newest regular production line from RoMa Craft Tobac. Blend-wise, it uses a Mexican San Andrés wrapper over a Brazilian binder and fillers from the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua. RoMa Craft considers the darker rosado wrapper to be Spanish Market Selection, a term that was once used along side American Market Selection and English Market Selection to describe wrapper colors. When the Maestranza line was unveiled, the company laid out a two-part plan to getting the cigar to shelves.

First, it would release a limited edition 4 1/2 x 56 petit gordo size known as CRAFT Maquette La Maestranza. That happened in July.

Sometime after that, the three regular production vitolas would ship. That’s what’s happening next week. Those three cigars are:

• Maestranza Ciutadella Catalonia (4 x 50) — $9 (Box of 40, $360)
• Maestranza Castillito Murcia (5 x 60) — $11 (Box of 40, $440)
• Maestranza Caballería Valencia (6 x 52) — $10 (Box of 40, $400)

As for the name, it’s inspired by the people who have helped get RoMa Craft Tobac and the associated Nica Sueño factory to where they are today, with a nod to “Chef’s Table.”

Previously, Skip Martin, co-founder of RoMa Craft, explained it on social media:

I considered a cigar in 2015 called La Maestranza de Barrio Oscar Benevides for CRAFT 2015. We had finished building Nica Sueño in our new neighborhood, and I wanted to mark the milestone of all of the work it took to get from our humble beginnings to that point.

In an early episode of Chef’s Table (Season 1, Episode 3) Francis Mallmann uses the word ‘maestranza’ defining it as ‘the people who are around you helping’. It had resonated with me ever since.

I’m very excited to get this one out there and hope whatever success it achieves stands to honor all of the people who are, and have been, around me helping me to execute and realize the vision that was/is RoMa Craft Tobac and Nica Sueño.

As the saying goes: No great thing was ever done by a single person. So it can also be said that no cigar is the result of the work of a single master. This project as with all of the thousand other little things we do every day are, as always, the result of the hard work and dedication of dozens of people, hundreds of pairs of hands on the oars moving them forward.

The secondary band features the initials of every employee of the company’s Nica Sueño factory.

Of note, due to trademark issues, the cigar will only be sold in the U.S.