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Tip of the Week
Q: How many layers of tobacco are there in a handmade cigar?
A:
It depends on the cigar.
There are no hard and fast rules about how many leaves make up a handmade cigar. Most cigars are made with one wrapper leaf, one binder leaf and three different types of filler. However, for both proportion and flavor variations, there can be more than one leaf of a certain type -- such as ligero -- in a filler blend. So one cigar can have eight or more. But even these rules are not fixed. Some cigars are made with two binder leaves; many Cuban cigars are made this way. In rare instances, some cigarmakers even use two wrappers on a cigar. Tabacalera A. Fuente y Cia. was a pioneer in this manufacturing method, creating a barber-pole-style cigar made with one dark leaf and one light leaf.
Thicker cigars can hold more tobacco leaves, so they generally contain more leaves than slim cigars, such as panetelas. That's why many robustos, Churchills and double coronas have more complexity of flavor than thinner cigars.
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