Smoked: El Rey del Mundo Oscuro Ronco

Smoked at: Sharonville, Ohio

El Rey del Mundo Oscuro features a dry, rustic, coffee brown Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper – thick veined dark Oscuro broadleaf. The binder and filler are all Honduran. It’s a full strength cigar in my book.

The wrapper looks coffee-colored so it’s no surprise the first flavor note is coffee (could be mind over matter…or blend), cedar, spice, sweetness (some cinnamon), pepper, dark chocolate, earth, some raisin, leather, vegetal and metallic notes. It’s interesting how some cigars sporting coffee and chocolate end up with a flavor of mocha and with others the two flavor notes remain distinct and separate. This cigar falls into the latter category. Pepper flares up on the retrohale The strength is through the roof.

Cool but tight draw - Perfect Draw opened it up. Now it has just the right amount of resistance. The smoke output was reasonable, but the burn line was very uneven – needed a GPS to stay on course (when is someone going to invent that cigar tool?), emptied the butane from my torch with the necessary number of touchups to straighten it out, through all this drama the white ash remained fairly firm and only dropped once.

In summary, the cigar was inconsistent from first to final third – sometimes balanced, sometimes lacking some flavors, complexity. It’s a stronger cigar than I prefer at this point in my life, but that’s me…now. 15 years ago I was burning LFD Double Ligero chisels as fast as I could buy them. So if you’re into full strength cigars this may be in your wheelhouse. The construction issues cost it some points. But…for the price point, it’s a good value stick. El Rey del Mundo Oscuro is a decent cigar.