BlankMindBlog

It’s about time for another cigar review and I have a couple of them down on paper but need to make time to get them into electronic form. So here goes…

I decided to smoke the Camacho Corojo Toro while visiting my mom and dad’s a few weekends ago. I purchased several of these sticks from Tobacco Cove, a local tobacco store that has been serving Jacksonville for over 30 years. Tom Trigg was generous enough to write down each cigar I bought and was going to add information about the filler, size, wrapper, etc. But there was no need for that.

The Camacho Corojo Toro is a beautifully made cigar. The wrapper was medium brown in color with a silky smooth, almost oily, feel to it. It balanced very well in my hand as I walked. A few small veins ran the length of the stick and it smelled of strong tobacco. I used my small punch on the cap and had this 6″ stick with a 50 ring gauge lit quickly. As I walked to the bridge I instantly noticed a peppery start to this cigar. It had an easy draw and produced a lot of smoke, making smoke rings a must with this stick.

Thirty years ago city engineers had the bright idea of trying to redirect the natural flow of the small creek that the bridge crosses and unknowingly destroyed some of the habitat. The old bridge was made of railroad tie sized logs with sandbagged buttresses and was capped with tar and seashells as the asphalt. The creek was about 20 yards wide at its widest point and never more than 6 feet deep at its deepest point.

I remember seeing a large turtle, the circumference of a garbage can lid, trudge through the thick grasses in the creek and disappear under the bridge into the dark water when I was a youth. There was a family of otters, at least four individuals that made regular trips from the swamp to the bridge that would glide through the water, catch and eat crawdads and sunfish. A large owl would sit on an old rotted limb and survey his domain about forty feet above the bridge in a old pine tree.

Today the small stream rebels and overflows its man made banks whenever a summer thunderstorm passes over. The otters are gone. The turtle we called granddaddy is gone as well. Recently, I have seen a small turtle move into the high grass and vanish, maybe a descendant of granddaddy’s? The engineers did manage to turn this small backwoods stream and bridge into a concrete culvert that really looks out of place in its wooded setting.

After a short time the Camacho Corojo Toro soon changed character and presented an agreeable nutty taste. I began to notice that the stick was not burning evenly about a quarter of the way through and had to touch it up. This cost about a half inch of tobacco. The ash was yellow gray and compact.

About halfway through the stick another pleasant change of taste appeared going from nuttiness to a smooth creamy base and back again. However, the stick began to burn unevenly again and made another touch up necessary. The ebb and flow of the taste from pepper to nuts to a creamy base continued through to the end. So did the uneven burn. Errant runners cost about 1 1/2″ of this 6″ stick due to repeated touch ups. Too bad because the flavors were consistent and enjoyable, the touch ups brought the overall score down. Three of the six sticks I smoked had the problem making this a 50/50 chance of a bad burn. At $4.99 a stick those are not good odds for me!