Ashton Aged Maduro #20
Size: 5.5 x 44
Tobacco: Dominican Republic
Wrapper: Connecticut Broadleaf

This cigar was recommended to me for a try by one of my favorite cigar guys at a local brick & mortar. The cigar is well constructed with no noticeable soft spots and a good looking wrapper with minimal flaws. The wrapper puts out scents of dark chocolate and cedar and the foot has similar scents as well as leather. The prelight draw had mainly notes of cedar and leather which combined for an earthy nuttiness.

Lighting it up, the first third had the cedar and nuttiness with some spice undertones. The cigar burned with a cool grey blue smoke and produced a decently thick amount of light grey smoke in large quantities. About a half inch into the smoke coffee emerged and slowly came into the forefront. In the second third coffee and dark chocolate were the dominant flavors with some nuttiness. This was my favorite part of the cigar, it was very smooth and all the flavors complimented each other in a seamless bouquet. In the final third, chocolate was the first to go and earthiness comes in. The spice comes in a little stronger and the coffee fades to the background. The finish is mainly earth and leather and gets a little bitter. Throughout the whole cigar the spice weaves its way in and out of the background. It was a good cigar, but the finish was a little disappointing.

I paired this with the Dalmore Gran Reserva scotch. This was a near perfect match for this particular cigar. The Gran Reserva has some similar undertone flavors as the cigar, and has other different flavors that compliment extremely well. It’s aged in traditional oak casks (as every scotch must be), but is aged even longer in a sherry cask giving it a distinct taste. At one point, I tried it with some Guinness and it took my palate about ten minutes to recover, that was not a good decision. Coffee would have gone very well with this for obvious reasons.

Final Verdict: This is a good mediumed bodied, smooth smoke and a decent value. It was an enjoyable cigar with a somewhat disappointing finish. I would smoke it again but it probably won’t be in my normal rotation. I give this cigar an 8.7

~Thank you again for submitting this guest review – please leave comments and let the author know how you liked it and if you’d like for me to keep up with these guest reviews!

First off – thank you to everyone who has kept coming back to the site this past week or so – as you have noticed – nothing has changed, haha. I forgot to turn on the auto posting through wordpress so when I thought I was putting up a review every other day, that wasn’t the case.

This week I was able to spend some much needed time with my fiance and her family and even got to see my side of the family for a few hours – can’t complain there. During this break I’ve been able to write a few more reviews, have plans for video reviews once the weather clears up (mid 20′s with wind chills in the teens – I like cigars but not enough to suffer like that for an hour and a half) but I was able to acquire a few more Cuban cigars, the Sopranos sampler along with a few cigarillo’s to review as well.

I have also been able to grab a few sponsors, please click away on the right hand side – Lots of great deals!

All in all, this has been a great holiday for myself and I hope that yours has been everything you wanted and more! Keep checking back, I’ll have my act together soon!

~David

Thank you all who entered, it really was interesting to hear everyone’s great accomplishments and I hope that there are more to come for all.

The winner of this contest was Mad Robusto – Please email me your address at phacue101@gmail.com and I will have them sent to you asap – hopefully in time for Christmas (Might be pushing it but we can try).

Thanks again to everyone, A new contest is already in the makings to check back often!

Okay, well – I guess we don’t want free cigars or perhaps I decided to make a contest that wasn’t so great – either way it was a total flop. It has been almost a week and no one has even entered a single review – so. . . yeah.

I still have these cigars and really want to make someone’s Christmas a little brighter. I will run this contest till Tuesday, December 22nd – they will be mailed out that day so be sure to enter! I normally like to run my contests a full week so everyone has a chance to enter – but. . . time not being on our sides I’m gunna rush this one a little.

Why? The celebration ‘excuse’ this time around is going to be getting close to almost 4000 unique visitors. If you have been following the site October 4th I hit 1000 unique visitors and November 27th I was just under 3000 unique views, so this is roughly one thousand new people to look at the site, each month. I’ve been able to pick up some advertising (please check out the hand picked adds on the right hand side), been able to build my database and most of all been able to make some amazing friends.

How to Win:
I’m sure some have just skimmed down to this part – and thats fine the first part was more of a toot my own horn deal – haha. Leave a comment about one of your ‘personal greatest accomplishments’ – now, this isn’t about you getting a degree or getting that big promotion but something that YOU feel was a big ‘pat on the back’ to yourself.
All entries will be like prior contests – entered into a hat and the drawing will be live VIA twitter Tuesday, December 22nd.

Enter away!