Today there are more flavored cigars than ever before, all fully capable of resonating with a beginner, intermediate, or even aficionado smoker.

For many, it was a flavored cigar that made a positive first impression before ultimately gravitating toward a conventional hand-rolled cigar (i.e., non-flavored).

Whereas conventional cigars naturally develop aromatics and flavors that subtly ‘hint’ at notes of other things, flavored cigars embody an intentionally-placed, dominant flavor note or two; flavors that have been directly applied to the cigar through processes that typically involve either a form of infusion, steeping, or soaking.

Flavored cigars come in many different forms. Some feature a sweetened tip, others feature only flavored filler, and some even feature an entire blend that has been sweetened. Some have homogenized tobacco leaf (HTL), others use only natural tobacco. Some are composed of short or mixed filler, others feature exclusively long filler. Some are as small as a cigarillo, others are as large as a Churchill. Some are machine made, others are totalmente hecho a mano (completely made by hand).

You get the idea.

The meticulously handcrafted Rough Rider Sweets Maduro Robusto features a core of fully aged Dominican long fillers, covered by a Mexican San Andrés binder and a seamless, oily and dark San Andrés Mexican wrapper. Medium-bodied, and bursting with rich flavors of chocolate, earth, and spice, a sweetened cap adds an extra layer of brown sugar sweetness that harmoniously ties these tasty notes together. 

Rough Rider Sweets are hand made by Tabacalera Palma in the Dominican Republic.

Popular flavors of sweetened cigar include (but are certainly not limited to): rum, vanilla, coffee, whiskey, cherry, cognac, wine, and honey.

Many who start their journey with a flavored cigar begin to eschew flavored varieties over time, often dismissing the flavored variety as somehow sub-par in comparison to a conventional cigar.

In reality, in North America flavored cigars vastly outsell non-flavored ones, and thus when you get right down to it, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder when it comes to a cigar.

Principes Corona are quite different from most of the flavoured cigars you will find in the marketplace and the main distinction is that Principes are premium cigars. Principes are made using 100% all-natural wrapper and filler tobaccos. Machine made in the Dominican Republic and bursting with aromatic flavour, the Principes V Corona is constructed using the tobaccos from the hand-rolled premium sector of La Aurora S.A – the Dominican Republic’s original cigar factory.

Today, the quality and processes of making flavored cigars have made great strides from what they once were, which predominantly saw factory reject cigars being desperately salvaged through the addition of flavoring, typically in the form of adding liquor. Prior to the 90’s cigar boom, flavored cigars more frequently fell within the machine-made domain. Today many are made by hand.

There are more flavored cigars than ever before, all fully capable of resonating with a beginner, intermediate, or even aficionado smoker. A good machine- or hand-made flavored cigar that is not too overpowering with its degree of sweetness (and is also not cloying) can serve a refreshing change from a conventional cigar and at a lesser cost.

Give one a try; your next flavored cigar may just remind you of those days when your cigar love affair first began.

Now, that’s pretty sweet.