Homage Blends and Cuban-Style Cigars

Homage blends

What Is a Homage Blend?

A homage blend is a cigar built in tribute to one you already know and love. It might be the classic Cuban style, the best parts of two favorites, one favorite with a change or two, or a cigar your brand sells today (see our established brands page). Whichever it is, our blenders start from there, and you end up with a blend of your own, rolled in our factories in Estelí, Nicaragua, and finished with your band and box.

Describing a flavor in words is hard. Pointing to a cigar is easy. When you can say “like this one, but a little stronger,” our blenders know exactly where to begin.

Every homage blend, our Cuban-style cigars included, uses legal tobacco grown outside Cuba, and it carries your name, never another brand’s. We take our cue from a cigar’s flavor, not from its band, box, or name. We make homage blends to order, for brands and also for clubs, companies, and private collectors.

Cuban-Style Cigars Without Cuban Tobacco

A Cuban-style cigar is a non-Cuban cigar blended to echo the rich, earthy, spicy character many smokers associate with classic Cuban cigars. Clients ask us for it often.

Cuban leaf has no place in our blends, whichever country your cigars are sold in, and Cuban cigars and tobacco can’t legally be imported into the United States. Cuban-style cigars made in other countries, entirely from non-Cuban leaf, are outside the embargo, so they can be sold in the U.S. like other premium cigars.

Much of that character starts with Cuban seed. Varieties such as Corojo, Criollo, and their newer hybrids are grown outside Cuba today, in countries including Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Mexico, and a blender can draw wrapper, binder, and filler from them. The seed alone doesn’t decide the taste, though. The same variety, grown in different soil and weather, gives a different leaf.

Leaf from Ometepe, a volcanic island in Lake Nicaragua, is one tool we reach for, because its mineral, slightly salty edge reminds us of some Cuban tobacco.

Can a non-Cuban cigar taste like a Cuban?

In spirit, yes. Expect the Cuban style, not a Cuban cigar. Our page on Cuban tobacco and its legal cousins explains how the origins compare.

Two Cigars You Love, Blended into One

Sometimes the answer is two cigars. You love the smooth start of one and the spice of another, or one cigar’s wrapper and another’s depth. Tell us what you like in each, and our blenders build a new cigar around those traits.

Think of it as cigar A plus cigar B, making blend C: a cigar of your own, with its own story. Traits you love in two different cigars won’t always work together in one, so let us know which matter most, and we’ll lean the blend that way.

A Favorite Cigar, with Your Own Twist

Perhaps there is one cigar you always reach for, and you would change just one thing about it: more strength in the last third, a longer finish, or a darker wrapper. We start from that profile and move it toward your taste, step by step, until it becomes your cigar rather than someone else’s. If your favorite is one of our own blends, that’s a tweaked factory blend instead.

The wrapper is where many twists happen, and it’s where our reach across the world’s tobacco really helps. Depending on the color and flavor you want, your wrapper might come from Ecuador, Cameroon, Mexico, or Brazil, or be Dominican, Honduran, or Nicaraguan leaf. The binder and filler underneath can draw on just as many origins, from Indonesia to the valleys around Estelí.

Match Your Current Blend

Moving your brand to a new factory shouldn’t mean asking your smokers to learn a new cigar. When you bring your brand to us, our first job is to match your current cigar.

The best place to start is the cigar itself. You send us some of your current cigars, which show us where your blend stands now. Anything you’re free to share about it, such as the known origins of its current tobacco, helps too. Our blenders smoke your cigars, deconstruct them (cutting a cigar open and smoking individual leaves), and match the profile with tobacco we source, then refine the match with you, sample by sample. We can also match a short filler cigar, though it isn’t a typical request: the vast majority of clients want long filler.

No blend stays identical forever. Weather, the field, and the harvest year all change the leaf, even for the factory that rolled your cigar first, which is why blenders often adjust their recipes from one year to the next. So we match your cigar by taste, as closely as the leaf allows, and keep it consistent from order to order through our quality control. Our Established Brands page has more for brands moving from another factory.

From Sample Blends to Every Size

For any of the four routes, first comes our intake process, built around the cigar or cigars you have in mind: what you love about them, what you would change, the strength you want, and who the finished cigar is for. Our page on custom cigars explains our blending process in more detail.

Once we have a direction on your flavor, our blenders roll several different sample blends, typically two to five. (One client asked for ten.) Samples are usually rolled as a 6 x 52 toro, 6 inches long with a 52 ring gauge, or about 152 by 20.6 millimeters. The toro is the most popular size across most brands, and rolling the samples in a single size means you compare the blends, not the sizes. The size is your call, though: one client wanted a 4.5 x 60, so we blended in that format alone.

You smoke the samples, at home or with us in Estelí, and tell us what works. We adjust the leaf and roll new samples until the blend is dialed in. You sign off before a single production cigar is rolled.

From there, we make your blend in other vitolas, the sizes and shapes you want, such as a robusto, corona, torpedo, lancero, or perfecto. A thinner cigar carries proportionally more wrapper and a thicker one more filler, so the same recipe can smoke differently from size to size. For each new size, we usually adjust only the filler. It is a mix of several tobaccos, and we fine-tune their amounts and proportions for that vitola, so every size stays true to the blend you approved.

Once rolled, your cigars need time to settle. Our advice is a minimum of 90 days of aging at the factory before they are banded, boxed, and shipped.

If this is your first brand, our guide to launching your own cigar brand is the place to start.

Homage Blend Questions

Is a homage blend the same cigar as the original?

Not when it starts from another brand’s cigar. Then it is a new blend, built from leaf we source, that takes its direction from a cigar you admire, and it goes out under your own name, band, and box. When we match your own current blend, the aim is the cigar your smokers already know.

Will it taste exactly like the cigar it’s based on?

Not exactly, but it can come very close. How close depends on the cigar and on the leaf available, and you decide when it’s close enough by smoking the samples. We have had several clients who have preferred our homage blend to the original. We pride ourselves on the quality of our tobacco, looking for well-fermented, clean-smoking leaf, something that not every factory prioritizes over just getting orders out the door.

Is my homage blend exclusive to my brand?

Yes. A homage blend is effectively a custom blend that grew from an existing cigar’s flavor profile, so we make it for your brand alone.

Can my band or box refer to Cuba or to another brand?

It’s safest not to. Your cigar needs an identity of its own. Brand names, bands, and box designs can be protected by the companies that own them, and some markets restrict words that point to Cuba on cigars made elsewhere. Run a trademark search before you settle on a name. We can recommend U.S. trademark lawyers, though the search and any filing are yours to arrange.

How big is a first order?

The same as for any project with us. A brand’s first order usually runs from 5,000 up to 25,000 cigars, while most club, company, and collector projects begin at about 1,000.

How long does a homage blend take?

About as long as any new project with us: roughly 6 to 9 months from a standing start, or 4 to 8 if your logo and other brand assets already exist. The sample rounds and the recommended 90 days of aging both fall inside that window.

If you are not able to come to Estelí, we can turn around tweaked sample blends in a couple of weeks and ship them anywhere in the world it’s legal to send them. Any licenses and taxes on your end are your responsibility. We will explain how a “fresh,” non-rested cigar smokes compared to the final product, helping you make blend decisions. We also have a few tricks to “speed up” the aging of samples, such as wrapping them in paper and freezing them for 48 to 72 hours, which, in our experience, helps them bypass the first few weeks of aging, when cigars can be at their least desirable in terms of taste while the tobaccos are marrying together.