How does the size of the cigar affect the taste?

Every cigar smoker, who occasionally smokes a cigarillo, though it may be from their usual cigar brand, will notice a significant taste-difference with their cigars. There is a simple explanation for this.

Normally, the individual formats of each particular cigar brand, will have a uniform aroma due to the brand's consistent use of their own particular tobacco mixtures. If you want to try a new cigar brand, we recommend you start with a Corona format, or better still, a Robusto. This also applies to the beginner. Many beginners often gravitate toward the smallest formats, avoiding the larger formats believing them to be stronger simply because they're bigger but this isn't the case.

Five different tobaccos usually go into a long filler: the wrapper is one; then the binder; and three different tobaccos for the filler itself. The art of a master tobacco blender is to carefully select these tobaccos for the best possible combination in terms of flavours and quantity. In a very small format, the stronger tobacco threatens to dominate, whereas in a Robusto format (with a diameter of 19.84 mm), a harmonious mixture is much easier to achieve.

The flavour of a fine cigar will develop and deepen as you smoke it. This represents an important point when we compare a cigarillo to a Churchill format. The taste of a cigarillo has little or no chance to develop because of its short smoking time, whereas a Churchill, thanks to its generous size, provides ample opportunity for the taste to develop. Sometimes the smoker may notice that cigarillos are bitter or too strong. With a larger format, when the selected tobacco mixture is truly harmonious, this does not happen at all, or it happens only toward the end of the cigar.

Besides the tobacco mixture, another factor comes into play when discussing flavour. A thick cigar acts as its own natural filter. As it is smoked, condensates, moisture and unwanted aromas are slowly deposited in the cigar and are only smoked at the end. We recommend smoking the more substantial cigar formats, the thicker, the better, to experience an optimal blend of aromas. Only these larger gauge cigars produce a corresponding volume of smoke to allow the flavours to evolve and taste differently.