J.C. Newman Cigar Co. reintroduces Yagua, a cigar from the tobacco fields of Cuba that the Newman family first recreated in Nicaragua last year.
The cigar was created by J.C. Newman PENSA’s General Manager, Lazaro Lopez, who was inspired by his grandfather, who took fresh tobacco leaves from the curing barns and rolled cigars without using molds or presses.To give his cigars a traditional shape, he tied a handful of them together using pieces of the Cuban royal palm tree, known as the yagua. The cigars are pressed together while still wet, giving each one a different, sometimes irregular shape.
The roughly 6 x 54 Yaguam has a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper around Nicaraguan binder and filler and comes in 20-count boxes. J.C. Newman is releasing 1,000 boxes of Yagua from its aging rooms this week.
“Yagua is a difficult cigar to roll because we use an under fermented Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper, blend the filler tobaccos differently, and do not use the usual tools and techniques of a cigar factory,” Drew Newman, fourth generation owner of J.C. Newman, said in a statement. “As the wrapper is not fully fermented, we age the cigars for a full year after they are rolled.”
