7. Don Rafael by Victor Sinclair

This was a 7” cigar from the Po Boy II selection that is allegedly all long filler. There were several veins in the wrapper leaf and it was “lifting up” in a couple spots. There were two separate ½” splits right against the cap on opposite sides of the cigar. This was a pretty firmly packed stick with a foot that appeared full. The draw was pretty tight but not overly so.

It began with a woody flavor that was ‘bright” tasting. Unfortunately the cigar had horrible burn from the get go. I touched it up several times and still at one point looked down to see the an ash silhouette of Florida burning down one side of the wrapper. The best flavors actually came out in the 2nd half of the stick. The smoke became more voluminous and took a slightly stronger profile (still mild-medium) while giving off a very faint hint of pepper. Toward the very end I got the taste of moist soil which rounded it off nicely.

The single best part of the cigar: Was the pseudo-dynamic flavor. It changed a couple times and held my interest.

The single worst part of the cigar: Was the construction. There were a couple issues with the wrapper as well as all the burn problems.

Overall rating on a scale of 1-10: 6.9 (The flavors were good, but the burn was more than annoying. Another stick that had potential, but fell short of being decent across the board.)