Thanks To R&D, We Certify For Free

Tobacconist University (TU) is the official educational curriculum of the IPCPR.  As their exclusive educational partner, TU certifies all IPCPR retail members as Certified Retail Tobacconists (CRT) for free: a $1,000 per person value for non IPCPR members.  This means, if you have a store with 3 tobacconists, TU will certify (and promote) them all for free!  At TU we consider this a strategic partnership with the industry's oldest and most prestigious trade organization.  In the process, TU does not receive any money from the IPCPR, but we are allowed access to the tradeshow.  In addition, our ability to work with the IPCPR creates promotional and political synergies which we can use to support and defend retail tobacconists. 


So, all of this begs the question, where does the money come from?  After all, we do not sell advertising and most of our certifications are free.  Fortunately, we have R&D!  R&D Cigars are Certified Cigars: the only cigar in the history of the world that you have to pass a test to sell!  R&D Cigars, standing for Research and Development, are exceptional premium products designed with an educational purpose:  educating your mind and palate.  R&D Cigars are also a competitive advantage since they are truly limited and Certified Retail Tobacconists must earn the right to sell them.  Introduced in 2014, R&D Cigars are already available at some of the world's greatest tobacconists, with many more to come!  You can learn more about R&D Cigars in the R&D Lab and from your local Certified Retail Tobacconist. 

Finally, we would like to say thank you to the thousands of consumers and Certified Retail Tobacconists who have supported R&D Cigars.  Without that support there would be no future for TU.   Specifically, we would like to thank our R&D CRT for having the passion and vision to support TU, educating themselves and their customers.  The future of TU holds more promise than ever and that is because of our R&D CRT!



 

  

Why Get Certified? Building A Culture Of Professionalism

What is certification?  Why should you be certified?  And how do you become certified?  These are the questions TU President and Founder Jorge L. Armenteros, CMT answers in this video interview.  

Whether they choose to get certified to strengthen their business, brand, and professionalism or to take advantage of the promotional value provided by TU, over 1200 tobacconists have already answered these questions for themselves.  But, every day legislators, special interest groups, bureaucrats and the nanny state try to usurp your professional and individual rights, disparage the tobacconist profession, and enact new taxes.  TU exists to educate consumers, professionals, legislators, and the entire world about premium and luxury tobacco products and their history.  Without education, there will be no salvation!

Of course, if you don't believe in a code of ethics and standards, professionalism, or excellence, then certification is not for you...

"The luxury and premium tobacco industry will not exist without the retail tobacconist"

The R&D Manifesto

 

Welcome to the future.  You can read all the "standard" info about R&D Cigars on the TU website in the R&D Lab.   Essentially, R&D Cigars are small batch, TU Certified cigars created with an educational purpose: educating your mind and palate.  At TU, we want to be about something (#beaboutsomething); we believe in substantive professionals and products.  We see more hyperbole and cult-of-personality marketing in the premium cigar industry than in perhaps any other.  Yet, there is enough substance, history, and tradition in the luxury tobacco industry that exaggerations are unnecessary.

While contemporary cigar marketers are busy creating outlandish and tantalizing brand names, using "sex" to sell, or trying to convince you that the picture of them inspecting leaves in the fields are authentic, retail tobacconists are working with consumers, face-to-face, on a daily basis.  While a cigar vendor can type up a bunch of alluring words on a website or for an advertisement, retail tobacconists are being accountable, honest, and educating their customers so they will return and become satisfied regulars.  Trust is the cornerstone of credibility and every successful retail tobacconist knows that.  It is easy to sit around in an office all day and concoct fancy words, but the real premium cigar industry exists in the retail tobacconists store because that's were the consumers are.  Retail tobacconists do not have the luxury of BS-ing customers: they must #beaboutsomething.  

With that said, we do recognize that marketing in the cigar industry is exciting and interesting.  There is so much innovation and communication happening that it is hard to keep up.  And at the very least, its never boring.  But, TU is not about exaggeration and empty words.  We want to #beaboutsomething.  Ultimately, if you call everyone a "master" or "legend" or if everyone is like "family" or your "brother",  then those words will lose their value.  The words we use at TU mean something; that's why we have the largest glossary in the industry, and we take those words seriously (ie. Flavor = Taste + Aroma,  Maduro is both a color description and fermentation process, and our certified retailers have a "real" store, not just a virtual one). 

At TU, we want to #beaboutsomething, and R&D is.  As you will see in the R&D Lab, extraordinary efforts have been made to educate your mind and palate.  While taste is, and will always be, subjective, we can teach and illustrate facts, history, and enhance your appreciation of luxury tobacco in the process.  While we look forward to many years of researching and creating educational products, we also hope that TU R&D will help and inspire others in the industry to take it to the next level and #beaboutsomething. 

In the future, when you come across R&D Cigars at a TU Certified Retail Tobacconist (CRT), you will know that everything about those cigars is authentic and the tobacconist who is curating them is credible because he/she is the first professionally certified tobacconist that had to pass a test to sell you a certified cigar.   Furthermore, all of the personal and product certification standards are transparent and freely available on the TU website: including but not limited to our Code of Ethics & Standards, the TU Academic Curriculum, our Glossary, Tobacconist Tips, FAQs, and all of the standards of TU Certification.

 

#beaboutsomething

Reverse Cigar Blending: "Tasting Components"

The process of blending a premium cigar is extremely challenging.  Some cigar makers and blenders have a natural talent for it – others don’t.  One of the unique talents a good cigar blender needs is flavor (taste + aroma) memory.  Flavor memory is the ability to recall a certain flavor profile in your mind.  With good flavor memory a cigar maker can remember what a particular seco from Esteli tastes like, versus another seco from Jalapa or Condega.  Then, a cigar blender must be able to project, in their mind, what that seco will taste like beside a viso, ligero, volado, binder, or wrapper, from another farm, country, and/or varietal family.  Further confounding the recipe is the fact that there are countless nuances to priming, air-curing, fermentation, aging (añejamiento), tobacco burn rates, and even proportioning and placing the tobaccos in the finished cigar.

The process of creating a cigar blend is daunting and there can be thousands of failures before a final blend is deemed worthy of production.   Yet, this is just the beginning.  Once a master blend recipe has been created, it must be tweaked to deliver its flavor and character in different vitolas.  Some cigar makers will further complicate the process by engineering each vitola to deliver a similar taste while others will tweak the blends to emphasize certain aspects of the components.  Lastly, a great cigar maker will be able to replicate the cigar’s flavor profile consistently, year after year.  Ultimately, cigar blending is its own art form which requires a lot of experience and talent.

While cigar blending is the process of putting tobacco leaves together to create a cigar, reverse blending is the process of deconstructing a cigar and analyzing its’ component leaves.

The TU method for reverse blending and studying a cigar’s components is called Ashtray Analysis.

Ashtray Analysis is the process of removing the cigar’s component leaves one at a time and burning them in an ashtray.  You can smell the tobacco leaf’s characteristics while it is burning in the ashtray.

WARNING: use a bucket of water to extinguish the burning tobacco leaves and keep a fire extinguisher at the ready.

Method
Wrapper and binder leaves will separate fairly easily and it should be easy to distinguish between them.

Burn the wrapper in the ashtray and smell the smoke.  After you have smelled enough,  put the leaf in a bucket of water and make sure nothing is left burning in the ashtray.  Repeat this step with the binder.  Once you remove  the binder, the bunch will continue to hold its cylindrical shape and you will have to finesse the filler leaves apart.  Try to separate the different leaves from each other: segregate by color and texture.  Once you have three to five filler leaves distinguished and separated, you can discard the smaller pieces of tobacco.  Don’t get discouraged if you can’t differentiate between all the filler leaves.

Hint: the ligero will be black(ish) and should be towards the center of the cigar.  It will have the strongest and/or most pungent aroma of all the filler leaves.

What did you learn?  In the end, this exercise will give you some insight into the individual leaves that went into creating your cigar.  And, hopefully, a new appreciation for the millions of tiny steps that go into creating a great cigar.

Research Expeditions

It has been an exciting and busy few months here at TU.  We were at the Nicaraguan cigar festival in December (2009) and the Dominican Procigar festival in February, 2010.  In the process I have spent hundreds of hours with great tobacconists, the Padrón family, the Garcia family (My Father Cigars), Pete Johnson of Tatuaje, Drew Estate, and I have had the pleasure of visiting with La Aurora, the Kelners at Davidoff, and the Quesada family at MATASA.   In addition, I just returned from a week long visit with the Padrón family in Nicaragua.  The Padrón family has been extremely generous with their time and I cannot find adequate words to express my gratitude.  Their commitment to every step of the cigar making process, our industry, and supporting retail tobacconists is unrivaled.  To date, we have over 300 Certified Retail Tobacconists and Apprentices at TU. 

Even after more than twenty expeditions to Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras, I manage to learn exponentially more every trip.  The amount of knowledge, skill, labor, and organization that goes into great cigar making is staggering!  Plus, there is artistry and intuition at play.  Every trip leaves me more in awe of the process.  And I have been particularly privileged to learn from the best cigar makers in the world – and had a great time in the process.

Moving forward, we will be developing content and disseminating much of our research through our facebook, twitter, and youtube channels.  Furthermore, we will be developing new videos and content for our academic curriculum to enhance your educational experience and appreciation.  I hope you will share this content with your friends and legislators as we strive to bring credibility to the luxury tobacco industry.   And above all, I hope you enjoy!

Stalk Priming

American Photo Services. Tobacco leaves drying, Havana Province, ca. 1920. From the Ramiro Fernandez Collection: I Was Cuba, Kevin Kwan.

For the better part of 2009 we have been researching and studying a very unique dark tobacco harvesting method known as Stalk Priming.  This is an exclusive presentation of an agricultural and processing method which has been hidden or lost to the contemporary world of cigar smokers.   We are calling this content “in development” because we would like to re-create these harvesting and processing conditions and ultimately taste the final product; that will take money, time, and more effort.  In addition, this is considered CMT Curriculum, or ‘advanced’ content which will eventually go into the testing process for Certified Master Tobacconists.

Regardless of all these details, none of the research and writing we do has any value if we do not share it, so here it is…  Please feel free to comment and share.

Thanks to Jose “Don Pepin” Garcia for sharing his time, experience, and wisdom during the development of this content.  The astute observer may have noticed that we included a definition of Stalk Priming in The Tobacconist Handbook and TU Glossary, but this is the first preview of the academic curriculum.