Tracing the annals of history, Winston Churchill can be linked to David Letterman just as Fidel Castro can be connected to George Burns and Mark Twain mentioned alongside Groucho Marx.
Indeed, one object has manifested itself prominently in British and Cuban politics, grayscale and Technicolor television, classic literature and “Duck Soup”: the cigar.
And of almost equal historical prominence is that other tobacco product that has drooped from the mouth of Sherlock Holmes just as it hung from the teeth of Lewis Carroll and dangled about the jaws of America’s original muckrakers: the pipe.
So with no offense to the likes of Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man, this column will concern itself with some of the world’s finer forms of tobacco and how students can easily — and affordably — walk State Street puffing the same seeds that grace Augusta National’s 18th green on any given afternoon.
The first key to understanding cigars and pipe tobacco is that, unlike cigarettes, they are not buzz-centric items. Sure, some well-packed Cavendish (a form of pipe tobacco) can lighten your head and a full-bodied Cohiba (a cigar brand) is sure to knock you off your feet. But tobacco selections are also concerned with taste.
Which brings us to Philly Blunts. Everyone knows these little cigars — they run for under a dollar a pop and can be found anywhere from The Den to your neighborhood Amoco station. Unfortunately, these are to hand-rolled cigars what Northwestern’s laughable basketball squad is to Bo Ryan’s boys (okay, bad analogy).
The big problem with Philly Blunts is that their “flavor” is basically sprayed-on junk with the consistency of Elmer’s Glue. Also, these dollar smokes are machine packed and essentially amount to a coarse grind stuffed with tobacco that might as well be straight out of a box of Parliaments.
The flavor in a real cigar is far subtler and comes from within the actual tobacco. The smoke is delightfully thick enough that it rolls about your mouth, smoothly bouncing within the walls of your jaw and leaving a gentle aromatic taste.
Admittedly it takes some rather substantial puffing experience to draw the flavor out of a good smoke. For beginners, however, there are flavored cigars available that come about their taste in a slightly more elegant manner than the aforementioned Philly Blunts.
The first technique is the dipping of the cigar in alcohol. Numerous cigar stores, including Knuckleheads, sell cognac and rum-dipped sticks that ought to offer some appeal to the UW’s notoriously inebriated populace.
The second technique, which has grown in popularity over the past several years, is the “infusing” of cigars with flavor. Drew Estate, a maker of affordably priced cigars (including many well under the cost of a pack of smokes), has recently introduced Kahlua-infused cigars, and various other companies, like Mayorga, produce coffee-infused sticks. The actual process of creating these scrumptious smokes varies somewhat, but normally the cigars are placed in an environment rich with the liquid they are desired to absorb and the tobacco’s porous nature does the rest of the work.
Pipe tobacco, similarly, has a very strong flavor that is matched by a most delightful aroma — both of which should be plainly apparent to any novice smoker upon their first drag. Both Knuckleheads and the Pipe Fitter have some rather divine black Cavendish that carries a rich sense of vanilla. Also, the latter store carries two in-house mixes of tobacco — “Par Shooter” and “State Street Blend” — that reveal outstanding tones of the outdoors.
Perhaps best yet, any of the aforementioned pipe tobacco blends can be yours for little more than $2 an ounce.
Of course, cigars are not measured by their weight. Rather, hand-rolled stogies come with two vital statistics: length and ring gauge. The former is a simple measure, in inches, of the cigar’s height. Be weary of any sticks smaller than four inches, as the flame will likely be in your mouth before you can truly savor the tobacco, but also be weary of any sticks longer than seven and 1/2 inches, as the semester might be over before you see the end of their burn.
Ring gauge, alternately, is a measure of how many 64ths of an inch a cigar is wide. The counts normally range from 35 to 50, but the emerging trend of late has been to produce cigars that are fatter and fatter, shooting many well over the half-century mark (Kenneth Starr forgot to ask President Clinton about the exact diameter of his notorious cigars). And while a width that substantial is sure to guarantee a buzz of unprecedented proportions, it seems to come at the expense of intricate tastes. Incidentally, some gauges have gotten so gigantic recently that select cigars no longer fit into the cutters meant to clip their ends.
In terms of finding a “right” ring gauge, consider the desired strength, how the cigar plays between your fingers and how long you want the smoke to last (the bigger the gauge, the longer the experience).
Alas, if you are still unconvinced that your tobacco selection really makes a difference, consider the words of British novelist John Galsworthy: “By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men’s souls.”
