Cigar part of “gift with purchase” at event
Background
It seems like longer ago, but in reality just last year…February of 2019…I worked on a 3-part series with short takes on some exclusive and hard-to-obtain CAO cigars. The Pan-Am Tour that Rick Rodriguez did in late 2018 was the source of that collection of cigars…a box of 6 cigars that were available only when you made a qualifying purchase at one of Ricky’s events. This year I was able to actual go to one of those events…in the days before COVID…and picked up enough other stuff that I got the new Rick Rodriguez Tour Event Sampler and decided to talk about them a bit again…and maybe this time around I’ll finish…yeah, I never did get to part 3 of the 3-part series last time.
So I originally thought these were going to be 3 totally different blends presented in 2 sizes each (total of 6 cigars in the sampler), but it appears they included the same blends as last year. The first cigar I’m looking at is code-named CAOCA 0216. It could be that they are doing different sizes of the same blends…I don’t have anything really from last year except photos, so I can’t compare exactly. At any rate, there’s no blend info and I’ll be pairing the cigars with favorites beverages this time around.
Notes
The CAOCA 0216 I saved for this was a thin box-pressed stick with a dark, oily wrapper. It was somewhere in the range of 6 to 6.5” by about 42 ring gauge. The leaf had leather and anise aromas to it, while the foot was a strong barnyard note. Once clipped the draw was good and tasted of earth, leather, and a hint of dark chocolate.
Once I fired it up the cigar had plentiful earthiness, with just a shadow of sweetness in the form of cocoa powder. There was black pepper on the palate and red pepper on the nose. i got secondary flavors of cedar and leather.
I paired this with Old Forester, a Bourbon I picked up a couple years back and never finished for some reason. I ended up cracking the bottle back open during “The Time of Quarantine” and found it better than I remembered. This is an 86 proof whiskey that is rich in notes of oak and spice, with caramel and vanilla taking more of a backseat, which is unusual for most Bourbons.
The cigar was medium-plus in body with a good earthiness from start to finish, along with a continuous black pepper burn on the palate. The red pepper on the nose faded a bit as it went on. The whiskey played mostly in the same range with wood and spice up front followed by a slight sweetness.
