El Mejor is a nice little cigar. I bought a box of these from CI about a month ago for almost no reason. My roommate got one for free, it smelled okay, and they cost me $40 for a box. It couldn’t be worse than a Chinchalero. I was, however, pleasantly surprised.
Given how much you spend, these cigars are surprisingly nice. They come in a rough cedar box, each cigar wrapped in cedar with a shaggy foot and pigtail. The Honduran Corojo wrapper looks pretty good, but when you take the cedar off you’ll start to notice veins, some cosmetic defects, and on some cigars, chips and lifting seams. Out of my box of 20, maybe three or four cigars had chips in them.
The shaggy foot shows off the filler, and makes lighting this one a breeze. First flavors involve a lot of cedar and some light creaminess on the back. When you get to the wrapper, the cedar is offset by the pungentness of the wrapper, and the creaminess thickens. The wrapper is surprisingly rich and tasty, given the two-dollar price tag for this cigar.
I found minimal complexity here, and the cigar doesn’t really evolve throughout the smoking, with the exception of the last third turning extremely harsh and altogether unpleasant. Again, for the price, this is not a cigar I felt bad dropping when it turned south on me. I also found that if you own a pipe that it will fit in, it does taste better if you simply put the cigar in your pipe bowl and smoke it through the pipe, so the pipe cools the smoke more.
I have smoked quite a few of these, and I haven’t had problems with the cigar unraveling or even the chips worsening; most of these defects were simply cosmetic. As far as bang for the buck goes, these cigars are pretty close to the top of my list. They wont blow your socks off, but they are decent light-medium cigars that I wouldn’t feel bad smoking in the morning with a cup of coffee or at a BBQ. Heck, I wouldn’t feel bad giving this to a guest who is a casual cigar smoker.
If you’ve got the space, its a pretty good knockaround cigar to keep on hand. As far as I know, Cigars International is the only place that sells these. Their normal price structure starts at $40 for the robusto and goes up, but fairly often they will be on sale for $40 for all sizes. You can find them here.
