Do We Really Need Another Cigar Review Website?

Fuck no! It’s really as simple as that. 😊

So why, then? Well, as I mentioned on my About Me page, this whole process came from diving deep into journaling and learning about cigars. Understanding how the variety of seed, growing regions and conditions, primings, fermentation, and aging processes all affect the different tobaccos used in a rolled cigar—and the sheer plurality of flavors they produce—got me hooked.

But anybody can review, anybody can share what they taste or experience, and everybody should. We all have different palates, and you may find that your tastes differ from a number of reviewers out there. Mine did. I had been sharing my reviews in different corners of the interwebs, and it got to the point where I felt the need to properly document and collect them. But I also had a TON of secondary data that I couldn’t really reflect in a standard review, and it was the type of stuff I felt was lacking elsewhere.

So, building a website felt like the best way to do that, and it offered the opportunity to do something different.

Cigar reviews are living pages.

While the review itself is a reflection of a single moment, I do plan to go back and add postscript notes where relevant. But more importantly, the review is just one instance of a journaled entry. Every time I smoke a cigar, it’ll be rated and have an accompanying journal photo. Those ratings are then aggregated and will create a live, overall score. Maybe I get a dud, maybe the cigars improve with age, maybe my palate evolves. This gives me the opportunity to track all of that. When you check out The List, that’s a dynamically generated page pulling all of that data together for every published cigar review.

Reviews describe flavors, but graphs make it visual.

We’ve all seen a flavor wheel, and reviewers use them to describe what they experience from a cigar, but sometimes it’s tough to tie that back or compare across blends. So, I created a simplified flavor wheel that visualizes the intensity of the basic flavor categories I experience. The goal is that the more I smoke a cigar, the more accurate the graph gets. Now, this is based on my palate, and we all have different palates, but you get the idea.  PS – you’re on mobile, that flavor wheel will be a bar chart. If you turn to landscape mode or get on a PC or tablet, it’ll show up as a radar chart, the flavor wheel. The whole site is designed to adjust and optimize the view between narrower mobile screens and widescreen desktop layouts.

I’m doing this without sponsorship.

And let me be clear: I’m not looking for sponsors. I don’t want to have to try and appease anybody with what I’m doing. It’s always been my journey and my opinions, and I want to keep it that way. I’m also not looking to shill for free shit. Seriously, fuck the guys who are only in it for free shit. This is about community.

In closing…

I’m just hoping that this helps some of you on your own journey. Maybe it inspires you to dive a little deeper. Or, at the very least, you just enjoy reading the site and manage to find a new favorite or two. If this goes nowhere, it goes nowhere. But all the amazing people I’ve met and new friends made along the way have made it worth it!

So, I appreciate all of you reading this, and #PSSITA. 😉

PPS – I really hope you like twisted humor and dick jokes.  If you don’t, fair warning, this might not be the place for you.