With a stack of new offerings from Tat, Drew Estate, Pepin, Alec Bradley and others accumulating in the HLC cabinet, we’re beginning to wonder if another humidor needs to be on our holiday wish list. We prefer to let purchases rest in the humi for a couple weeks and resisting the desire to indulge in this new crop of post-IPCPR releases is hard to say the least. Hopefully, reviews of the aforementioned sticks will go up soon, or at least some consideration of these releases can be included in the HLC “best of” lists now that 2011 has just about blown by. So as the new-release tastings are beginning, an extra-large One Timers post seemed to be in order.
The number eight figures prominently in this second edition of our One Timer quick reviews. Eight cigars are covered in the post with five earning an HLC rating between 88.0 and 88.9. That’s a lot of eights! Two sticks managed to break the oh-so-important, 90-pt. barrier. One of these highlights is nearing iconic status (in our opinion) and another surprised us with an intense, but pleasant sweetness.
As a reminder, the One Timers format is reserved for recent smokes that we weren’t compelled or able to create full-length reviews for. Some One Timer sticks have only been tried once, some are go-to sticks we’ve been enjoying for years and others weren’t considered noteworthy enough to warrant a full analysis....