The Pastor and the Shrink - Cigar reviews for your mind and spirit - John Bull

2-22-2010

John Bull
The Man Shed
Dave and Randy
Robusto - $4.00

This is a relatively inexpensive cigar and you can tell. It has a light brown and very veiny wrapper. It is fairly spongy to the touch and I found a significant soft spot in the cigar about a third of the way down, this usually means that there will be burn problems in that area. I also found a split in the wrapper of my cigar. The interesting thing is that Randy’s cigar showed none of the construction issues that mine did – sometimes it is literally the luck of the draw.

We clipped the cigars and tested the draw Randy found his to be just right, whereas mine was very tight. This was somewhat surprising as it was not at all tightly packed – this generally means that it is plugged and that is a significant problem. In looking at the cigar I do not see any clearly visible stems protruding that might be causing the blockage. As it is, I am really having to work at drawing air through the cigar.

There is not much going on with this cigar it is very mild almost bland. There is a slight little spice or pepper on the finish but very little. The cigar burns pretty well although it has a thick and wavy burn line. It produces a relatively compact and tight ash without much coning.

We paired this cigar with Fuller’s London Porter which is one of my favorite beers – my brother Rob introduced me to it and it has only recently become available in Kansas. It is a wonderful, rich, dark, and flavorful beer. I’m enjoying it much more than the cigar.

This cigar was what we thought it was, to paraphrase ex-Arizona Cardinal’s football coach Denny Green. It was very mild and lacked in any interesting tasting notes. It started mild and stayed that way. As I said before it was pretty bland. I also had problems with mine in terms of its construction and draw. Randy did not experience any of those issues but still found the cigar fairly mediocre.

We gave it a 2 – we would not go out of our way to smoke one and in fact would choose almost anything over it, but if you wanted to have a smoke while you were fishing or playing golf and did not want to feel bad if you had to abandon it this cigar would fit the bill.