How Many Smokes to Fill the Herf?

Michael Moretti
Posted: February 27, 2008

How many smokes does it take to get to the top of a Stinky's Herf Edition Ashtray? Let's let you the smoker count the ashes.

This is the idea behind a curious challenge conceived by one of the cigar industry's most verbose personalities and one of its most resourceful entrepreneurs. Last February, Jose Blanco, La Aurora's charismatic director of sales, teamed up with Stinky, the surname-less creator and owner of Stinky Cigar Ashtrays -- the hit deep-dish receptacle assembled from household items -- to create a contest out of filling the massive ashtray.

Blanco was given Stinky's three-gallon, punch bowl-size ashtray called the Herf Edition as a gift last year. Colleagues saw the gargantuan bowl on his office desk and bet him he could not fill it by the end of the year. Blanco got to wondering how long and how many cigars it would take to fill the whole thing to the brim solely with ash -- no butts, cellophane, bands or anything else. Then he thought some more, and asked, Why not make this a contest? So he did.

Click above to hear more about how the contest came to be.

After 10 months, he accomplished what most thought to be impossible and filled the ashtray. In December, photographs were sent to Stinky to post on his Web site under the banner "La Aurora Contest" challenging contestants to field their most accurate guess as to how many cigars it took to fill the Herf. First prize is a 100-count box of Aurora 1495 Connoisseur Selection and a Stinky Herf Edition cigar ashtray. Second, third and fourth prizes also include La Aurora cigars and/or Stinky ashtrays. The Herf Edition Contest ends on March 13.

For more details on the contest and to venture a guess, go to www.stinkycigar.com.

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