Blog & Cigar News | Mardo Cigars

Bars, rapping bars, spit bars and got none of those. I got cigars. Hi and welcome to another episode of Mondays with Mardos. This week, we're going to go over what consists of making a cigar. But before I get going, I need you to click on that subscribe button, click on the bell to be notified every single week of new episodes on Mondays with Mardos.

So today we're going to take a look at an actual cigar that I have cut out. I actually unraveled it so therefore it's actually in its original state still. I just took it apart and we have the filler section. We have the binder and then we have the wrapper. So in order for you to know if this is truly a premium cigar is, you want to make sure that the fillers are actual long fillers, they're not chopped little pieces of tobacco. That's going to be called a short filler tobacco. Now there's another term called a sandwich tobacco, which will consist long filler with short filler and that is going to be something that's going to be inexpensive and therefore it's not going to be really a true premium cigar. A true premium cigar, as you can see right here, I'm taking this apart. And I want to show you that these fillers are actually long leaves, one piece and this is very compacted because it was an actual cigar.

So some of it is falling apart because it's been dried out, but I'm trying to do my best here to give you guys a really good visual of piece by piece. Now, some of them are going to be thicker than others and I'll tell you why that is. For instance, you see this right here, there's a lot more of its kind than this right here and that's because of what the blend is demanding. So for instance, in this cigar, it only demands a little half a leaf or a quarter leaf of this species of tobacco. This could be like corojo or criollo. And then as you can see here, this would be maybe called a full leaf or a three quarters of a leaf, it all depends on the blend. And you can see, this is a little bit darker.

So I'm assuming this is probably like piloto cubano, which gives you more of that earthy and little bit more strength in the cigar. But the main thing is that you can see is that everything is a consistent piece, it's long filler. This also looks like piloto cubano so this could have been one and a half leaves of piloto cubano, a quarter leaf of... I don't know if this is criollo, I can't really tell until I burn and smoke it, which I'm not going to do right now. And you can see here, there's another long filler. I'm not sure what this is exactly. The reason why I know this is piloto cubano is because this is a cigar that I have created its blend and I know it has a lot of piloto cubano in it and the darkness of the piloto cubano is very prevalent or very obvious to me.

And here we go, this is the last part of the filler. So what's happening here when a cigar torcedor is actually making the cigar, he's taking these leaves and he's bunching them in his hand. There's a method to it too, because you also have different primings of the tobacco plant within the filler. You have the ligero that we all know is a very thick leaf. So therefore, it's going to burn a lot slower. It's going to be hotter because since it's thicker and it's going to be oilier, so therefore the combustion is going to be hotter. But you got to make sure that also on the outside, when you're bunching the outside, when I say outside, so this, you're bunching, right? You want just make sure that the outside of the filler is usually [seco 00:03:54]. The reason why you want it to be seco is because it's thinner tobacco and that's going to combust a lot faster, allowing the ligero to catch up to it.

So whenever you see a cigar and usually it has that pointy arrow, big old ash on it, is because the seco on the outer part of the cigar is burning faster than the ligero. So that could be a sign of you slowing down a little bit, let the ligero burn, catch up with the seco. So I think I've made a pretty good point here that this is truly a long filler premium handmade cigar, with the filler being the actual testimonial culprit, whatever you want to call it. And voila, there's a couple broken pieces here, but this will not consist nothing of being labeled as a short filler cigar. Next, once you have everything bunched, you're going to have a leaf like this, and this is called a binder. As you can see the binder here has much better consistency of its characteristic. When I say that, I mean, that it is not as rough.

A lot of these tobacco right here are very wrinkled together, they're bunched up and the way they've been cured and dried and age is just there. There are in little bunches, where this has been cured a little bit with more delicacy. So therefore, this is going to be used as a binder. Now, a binder is a leaf that never graduates to become a wrapper because it may have too many veins on it and it's a little bit rougher on its look. And then there's a lot of inconsistency in its color within its actual area that you're going to use it. So on a actual rolling table, you'll have this leaf ready, just like this, it's nice and wet. And then you'll take all the filler that you have and you're going to put it together and you're going to roll it just like that. As you can tell, this is very dry because it was an actual cigar.

Once you have it like this, then you're going to put it into a mold which is shape... it's a tray and we call them molds. And then it has half with the shapes in it. You put it in there. Once you complete the entire tray of a bunch of cigars, you're going to put the top half on it and you're going to put it in a vice and you're going to clamp it and you're going to allow it to be pressed. So therefore it gives you that perfect spherical shape. Once you have that, within a half hour, 45 minutes, sometimes even when you do it overnight, you can take out the actual cigar from the mold and it's going to have that perfect cylinder shape. Did I say spherical? I meant to say cylinder. Maybe I shouldn't get so fancy with my words. Now, you're going to complete the cigar with the beautiful wrapper. Now the wrapper leaf is going to be the most expensive part of the tobacco end of cigar. Reason being is the way that wrapper leaf is handled, it's more delicate, it takes a lot more experience.

And one way I'm going to show you guys, there's a big difference between binder and wrapper is, you can see over here that there is these little squiggly lines, that is a vein. The distance between the veins here, you can see, are maybe about an inch. When you take a look at a wrapper, when you see the vein distance right here, you see it's almost doubled. So therefore, there's less veins within the surface area, which makes the leaf a lot more prettier and that's why it's going to allow it to qualify for a wrapper. And you can see that the shading and the color is very consistent and that's why this tobacco is going to be a lot more expensive. And once you finish off the cigar with the wrapper, you have yourself a premium handmade cigar. So let me know in the comments if this video was useful or educational and what else you'd like to see next week. That's it for now, I'll see you guys next week. Remember to follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook and remember to tell your friends to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Peace.