Who We Are
Here at Highlight Cigars, we’re passionate about cigars and the cigar industry. We spend our days working on various online marketing and content development projects, so starting a cigar blog seemed like a great way to combine our interests and abilities.
Perhaps the best way to describe the “us” in about us, is to point out what we are not and what we don’t do.
We enjoy writing and photography but we are definitely not journalists or aspire to be journalists. We find our own personal lives and likenesses tremendously interesting, but we aren’t sure that anyone else would feel the same way. So you won’t see many pictures or videos of us and there are no plans to upload stories about what’s going on in our personal lives or accounts of us hanging out with cigar personalities outside the context of an interview. There are others with very dynamic personalities that do these things well and we enjoy their publications immensely.
The entire focus of Highlight Cigars is on providing the best cigar-related information and opinions. We hope you like it.
Highlight Cigars Review Process & Objectives
Like it or not, the Cigar Aficionado/Cigar Insider reviews generate more attention than those from any other single cigar rating resource. Manufacturers always publicize their CA/CI 90+ scores. Distributors, retailers and publishers throughout the industry either directly or indirectly reference CA scores in their websites and literature as well. The CA/CI system isn’t perfect, but it’s difficult to argue that their scores aren’t a critical reference point for cigar enthusiasts and professionals.
Because of this, we think it’s practical to rate cigars on the familiar 1-100 scale used by CA/CI. There are distinctions we make in the application of our ratings scale however. Our goal is not to dispute CA/CI reviews or those of any review publication online or offline. Instead, we hope our scores will provide a useful review profile of every cigar we publish information about and aid enthusiasts as they make their cigar purchasing decisions.
As mentioned above, we use a 0-100 scale and most scores will fall between the low 80s and the mid 90s. The 90 pt. score is often the division line below which scores are often interpreted as being low. If you read CA/CI scoring standards, you know that a score in the high 80’s is a good thing, but perception is reality and because CA/CI rarely publish scores in the low 80 (we can’t recall seeing a score lower than 83 or 84 ever) we feel it’s appropriate to maintain a similar scale for our ratings.
If a cigar review is reviewed on Highlight Cigars, we have deemed it to be of good quality and/or worth trying depending on the reader’s preferences. With that in mind, here’s how we group the ranges in our published reviews:
85 or below: A decent smoke that we detected one or two issues with. Probably not for everyone.
86-89: A cigar that performs well and delivers good flavor. Cigars in this range just need a bit of extra flavor, complexity or combustion performance to break in to the next level.
90-93: A highly recommended smoke with first-rate construction, appearance and a memorable flavor.
94 and above: A classic smoke that all enthusiasts should experience.
We arrive at our final number by rating a cigars visual appeal, combustion performance and flavor with separate scores. Then some math ensues that includes aggressive weighting of flavor scores and linear scales to keep grand totals in the low-80’s to mid-90’s range.
