A friend of mine gifted me a carton of Cuban cigarettes, "Popular Negro" which is said (or written) to be made of 100% Cuban tobaccos. This is the first time I smoked a Cuban cigarette so it was somewhat interesting to me. It has a 20 mm long filter. I was told that unfiltered ones are stronger. I wondered how it smokes without a filter and I cut off the filter of a cigarette and smoked it. It was stronger but not too much but gave more cigar-like taste. The interesting side is it has low amount of nicotine (0.7 mg) and high amount of tar (10 mg) which is same in Oriental blend cigarettes. Yes, it tastes cigar-like but also Oriental-like, in a way.
As seen from the photos, it has a basic package design but as written in the BRASCUBA's website they're renewing the design for their export interests.
The dissection image is below, the blend is almost entirely consisted of air cured or dark tobaccos as the name "Negro" suggests. There're really few stems in a cigarette which are, I believe, mostly secondary veins (on the right in the picture below). They're coarsely cut as the tobacco lamina. No reconstituted, expanded other high-tech stuff in the cigarette. This is why the tobacco inside the cigarette (filler) weights more than the other international brands. Nowadays, fillers in a cigarette generally weight around 0.4 g (400 mg) but this one weights 0.7 g (700 mg). I guess this is one of the benfits of low-tech cigarettes.
Well, does it smokes wonderful ? A regular American blend smoker will probably find it weak but an Oriental blend smoker (like me) finds it balanced. But I think anybody who tries this blend would find it tasty. So it's time to duplicate it.
If you have nicely cured and aged/kilned mild tasting lower leaves from a cigar tobacco variety you may use them as the base of the blend which may consist 50% of the blend. Other 50% depends on your palate.
I used two Orientals and a cigar leaf to duplicate this blend.
50% Maden (my own)
25% Canik (my own)
25% Dominican Seco (from Whole Leaf Tobacco)
It tasted right and it was a nice clone but burned faster than the original blend. I think a ligero leaf would make it more tasty but the Dominican Seco is what I only have from WLT as a filler grade.
As seen from the photos, it has a basic package design but as written in the BRASCUBA's website they're renewing the design for their export interests.
The dissection image is below, the blend is almost entirely consisted of air cured or dark tobaccos as the name "Negro" suggests. There're really few stems in a cigarette which are, I believe, mostly secondary veins (on the right in the picture below). They're coarsely cut as the tobacco lamina. No reconstituted, expanded other high-tech stuff in the cigarette. This is why the tobacco inside the cigarette (filler) weights more than the other international brands. Nowadays, fillers in a cigarette generally weight around 0.4 g (400 mg) but this one weights 0.7 g (700 mg). I guess this is one of the benfits of low-tech cigarettes.
Well, does it smokes wonderful ? A regular American blend smoker will probably find it weak but an Oriental blend smoker (like me) finds it balanced. But I think anybody who tries this blend would find it tasty. So it's time to duplicate it.
If you have nicely cured and aged/kilned mild tasting lower leaves from a cigar tobacco variety you may use them as the base of the blend which may consist 50% of the blend. Other 50% depends on your palate.
I used two Orientals and a cigar leaf to duplicate this blend.
50% Maden (my own)
25% Canik (my own)
25% Dominican Seco (from Whole Leaf Tobacco)
It tasted right and it was a nice clone but burned faster than the original blend. I think a ligero leaf would make it more tasty but the Dominican Seco is what I only have from WLT as a filler grade.
