The Particulars

This LEGACY review for the Casa de Garcia Connecticut - Toro (5.5 x 50) is based on the journal entry dated 2024-10-21.

Note: My original review format only had a single overall score of 1 to 5 with the “Buy it Again?” value assessment.  This mean’s there’s no sectioned scoring for different factors and I didn’t capture data for my flavor wheel, which may be blank.  If I have journaled the cigar again since I began capturing flavor wheel data, that data will be present.  If the cigar is still available to me, I will eventually replace the legacy review with one in the current format. 

The Connecticut has a shade wrapper with a CT Broadleaf binder around Dominican / Honduran filler. It looks like beat-up cardboard… 😬 Dry-looking, gappy seams, tons of lumps. I think I know where newbie rollers go to get started. 😅 I checked the stick’s RH just to make sure it wasn’t dried out; it was reading 62%.

The cold smell was sweet tobacco with nothing really notable. Lit, it was a lot of leather and cedar, with mild chocolate and sweetness. The flavors are pretty dull, but at least they’re not bad or bitter. Like, I’ve had subjectively worse blends from more expensive smokes, but this isn’t converting me to the Costco style of cigar buying. 😅

The burn was odd. It was wavy, but you would get little tunnels and channels that would appear and self-correct. You can see one in my photo where the char line is notched out. The draw was tight but workable without the draw tool. But it held a decent ash and never required a relight or touch-up.

Overall, there’s nothing really special here, but nothing really terrible. It’s an adequate cigar considering it’s basically a $2 stick. If you were buying a bunch to relabel for a wedding or baby shower or something, it would be a pretty safe bet. Your knowledgeable cigar friends would be underwhelmed, but most wouldn’t know any better and nobody would hate the smoke

Review Base Rating (0-5):

2.00

Would I Buy It Again?

Outlook not so good (skip it)

Review Final Score (0-10):

3.33

Overall Score and Individual Journal Entries

While the review is based off one instance of journaling this cigar; there’s a number of reasons you can have different experiences smoking the same cigar multiple times. A blend can evolve with age (for better or worse), palates evolves, preferences change, and sometimes you just get a bad example!  This section captures the ratings from each journal entry and the related journal photo.  Below you’ll find an aggregate score based on every time the cigar has been journaled. Unless it was a gift or on-off smoke, this section will be updated every time I journal this cigar!