2022 Awards

At its core, this is best described as a 198-cigar tournament. Over the course of 2022, we published 198 reviews of cigars that were first released in 2021 or 2022. All of these reviews involved one person smoking three cigars. If the average score of those reviews resulted in a 91-point rating or higher, the cigars advanced to the next round.

Historically, this list relies on the human senses of sight and feel, but our 2022 list made us use another one of our senses.

Our four writers produced seven nominees for Company of the Year in 2022. It’s an incredibly diverse list of names from small companies to some of the biggest names in the cigar industry; companies that have multiple factories—one with factories in multiple continents—to companies without a factory; and companies with ages ranging from seven-years-old to one that is more than seven decades old.

After skipping last year due to complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic, halfwheel’s Factory of the Year award is back.

In previous years there was always a plethora of new cigar companies popping up, usually quite evident by looking at my to-do list for booth coverage at the PCA Convention and Trade Show. More recently, there has been a dearth of new companies, with 2022 being no exception.