Blog & Cigar News | Mardo Cigars

And Monique is smiling behind a camera, I can tell, because she's happy that I did this all in one take.

Hi and welcome to another episode of Mondays with Mardos. I'm Gerard, and this week we are going to talk about what do master blenders smoke when blending cigars? What is the process from start to finish? Anyways, before I get going, I need to click on that subscribe button, click on the bell to be notified every single week of new episodes on Mondays with Mardos.

All right, you guys. So I got asked a question here, which was pretty intriguing. What do masters blend... What do master blenders smoke when blending as cigar? What is the process start to finish in creating a new blend of cigar? So that's two part questions. I'm going to tackle only one of them. And we're going to talk about what does a master blend smoke when blending a cigar.

Well I, myself am not a master blender, but I'm a blender of cigars and I do have our master blender and we get together. And whenever we're going to start a new project, one of the first things that we do is we roll pure grades. What the heck is a pure grade? Well, cigars consists of multiple blends, right? There's multiple tobaccos in there. And a lot of them have classifications. You have Corojo, you have Criollo, you have Olor, you have Piloto Cubano, you have Ometepe you have different regions of things. You have things coming out of Brazil.

So what we do is we take one strain of tobacco and we roll in little tiny cigarillos and we smoke them. So therefore we can reintroduce our basically taste buds to what Criollo would taste like. So therefore I can drop a baseline. After I get Criollo down to my taste buds, I'm like, "Aha, that's right. Criollo tastes just like that. It's Tangy. It's sweet. It's got some bitterness to it." So Criollo this day and age, because every crop changes, today's Criollo is very good. So I'm going to use a little bit of Criollo. So therefore then I go to Piloto Cubano and I roll a little bit of tiny cigarillo and I smoked a pure grade just to remind myself what Piloto Cubano tastes like and knowing what today's crop is tasting like as well.

And once I smoke all my pure grades, I have a baseline. Then I get pen and paper and I start thinking about what matches with what. What do we have that's new that I've never worked with. And therefore we'll go to the blending session. And once we do that, we have to think about a binder tobacco. So when it comes to the binder, again, we have to roll pure grades, making sure that the binder is holding well together, it's smoking correctly. And it is tasting very, very well. Once we have that selected, then we got to think of a wrapper.

Now the wrapper is the easiest thing to always switch out. It Is because it is the exterior part. So you don't have to break open the cigar and start switching things. So once we have the blend created, and then we have already decided on a binder, we'll go ahead and roll it. We put it in the press. We'll do multiple of these, anywhere between 10 to 20 of these cigars. And then from there, we put different wrappers on each cigar and that's what exactly we smoke. So on blend number one, I'll put a Connecticut wrapper. Blend number two, I'll put a Corojo wrapper and so on. Depending what it is I'm trying to make and what market I want to enter. Do I want to be in a full body? Do I want to be in a mild cigar segment? It all depends what I'm trying to do. Or am I just trying to create a very beautiful cigar? And I don't really care what segment it falls under. I just want to create something really good.

So that's what master blenders and blenders usually smoke when they're creating a blend. It is they are smoking their latest creation. Now, along with this, after 30 days, once we have... Let me pedal back. Once we decide what we like as a blend, we'll let it sit for at least 30 to 40 days for the tobaccos to marry and see what it's going to taste like, so therefore we can make sure that there's not so much ammonia in the cigar and it's not very, very bitter. So hopefully that answers your question. If you have any other questions, let me know in the comments. I'll see you guys next week. Remember to follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook, and remember to tell your friends subscribe to our YouTube channel. See ya.