INTER TABAC 2010 DORTMUND - GERMANY

Just back from a trip to Europe which included a visit to the INTER TABAC 2010 in Dortmund Germany,

i arrived in Germany on Thursday 16 Sept, after a 3 hours drive coming from my Hometown 's-Hertogenbosch in Holland, unfortunately there was some heavy traffic so the planned 2 hours became a 3 hours drive.
I stayed in the Pullman Hotel opposite the exhibition center, the first night i walked into a bunch of german guys which i know for years so we smoked and had drinks till 3:30 AM,
the next day i had a great german breakfast with nice bread, (i miss the European bread, in the DR the bread sucks) when i parked on the parking of the exhibition center i saw the son of one of my German Clients so he luckely had had a pass arranged for me for the 3 days so i could walk into the show without any registration, Friday the first day of the trade show is always a little quite ,because retailers usually don't close their stores, so the friday is mainly international visitors from all over the world, for them it's easier to come to Germany then to go the the US (IPCPR) so i walked into Russians, Chinese, Indonesian,
Norway, Czech, Polish, Indian & Turkeys people, it's good i made sample cigar boxes which i handed over as my business card, you have to know that i didn't had a booth so i made sample boxes instead with my business card inside, see image,
the first day ended with a big come together party, with a great diner and a band playing, i shared the table with Nestor Andres Plasencia his Brother Gustavo Plasencia & the sisters Rachel & Patricia Quesada, a lot of other people where present, like Rocky Patel, Pete Johnson, Christian Eiroa, Pepin Garcia & complete family and many many more.

the second day was great i had several appointments with clients & potential clients, and some deals where sealed, the second night was reserved for a Mexican Party, when i left the Hotel i walked into Christian Eiroa who forced me to walk to walk with him to the Mexican Party, to after a 30 minutes walk in short sleeves, (temp. 12 celcius)we arrived at the Park Hotel, the Party was nice with a nice Mexican style buffet, after the party we decided to go out, so together with party Animal Rocky Patel, Christian Eiroa, Pete Johnson, David Blanco & the boys from humipack we headed downtown Dortmund to a place called Justin's.

Here we stayed and chilled out till 4 AM.

The next day and last day of the show i didn't feel very good, i was exhausted (Thank you guys) anyway i had some other meetings and 5 PM i decided to leave to drive to Holland to have diner with my parents and my brother & Family.

i arrived in Holland at 7.30 PM , went out for Diner , slept, and left the next morning early to Belgium to catch my flight to the Dominican Republic,

unfortunately for me my Fu.... flight had a delay of 13 HOURS !!!!!!
so the flight left at 1 AM and arrived in Puerto Plata the same night at 4:30 AM
(6 hours time difference) so all in all a Heavy trip.

it took me several days to get rid of the jetlag but i am back on track again, anjoying a cigar (while writing this) in Camp David Ranch here in Santiago.

intercigar launches website

Finally after weeks of work we finished our website,
still a few things i want to polish but i thought it is
good enough to put online for now.

so please have a look at our webpage, we are working also on a HTML version
for computers who don't support flash, this will take a few weeks to be ready

but for now we have the flash version up an running and we are very pleased with the result

www.intercigar.com

video's youtube

I made a direct link on the Blog (see below) to Youtube where i will post some video's once a while, mainly business related but sometimes some private stuff if funny or interesting.

Hope you like them

cheers

intertabak messe Dortmund - Germany

preparing stuff for the intertabak messe in Dortmund the probably largest tobacco show in the world with more booth's as the IPCPR - US,
for many people from asia and east europe its easier and closer to go to germany then to the US, the booth's in this show are average smaller then in the US but business is not bad, i would say a total different market in Germany but for sure interesting.
The show will be starting on the 17th and will last 3 days

i will keep you posted and will get some pictures & information while there or afterwards,

cheers

Website creation

I am currently finishing our website, it was really time to get the website done,
always under construction is not good, i wanted to create a site with general information about our activities and at the same time, allow an inside look in our factory, well imho i think we did a nice job, but judge yourself as our website will be on air www.intercigar.com

IPCPR 2010 New Orleans

Just Back from the Trade Show in New Orleans, for me it was the 3th time to go to New Orleans, the first time was a couple of years ago just before Katrina destroyed Nola and in 2009 and now,

I wasn't planning to go but on the last moment to many people where asking me to come over so i couldn't say no, well i don't regret going i did great business,
all in all i think that i sold .... cigars, the number i want to keep for myself
but i can tell i am more then happy.

thing is that a lot projects are taking place over the next months into next year
so the real number is hard to say.

for a private label manufacturer its always nice if people are looking for you and
what makes me even more happy is if my clients are doing well, if they do well we do well.

As expected the show attendance was low, not to many retailers took the time to come to New Orleans and the all over attendance compared to 2009 was at least 25% less,
what surprised me was the fact that the booth from companies like General cigar where packed, maybe the free food & drinks where atracting people but the booth was packed on the first and second day, the reason i was surprised is that a lot of retailers seem to hate doing business witg General, why ... the reason lays in the fact that general is owned by the swedish match / STG group who is also owner of cigars international a Bath - PA based internet retailer (discounter)
the complain of many retailers is that a lot of products sold by General cigar on the US market can be found frequently for close to wholesale prices on the Cigars International website, and this i really a pain in the A.. of the retailers,
so i was really surprised to see the General booth packed.

On this way General will continue doing what they are doing, well done retailers, keep buying from General Cigar.

Not my problem at the end of the day, but i would have a retail store i wouldn't buy from them anymore, that i can tell.

the food as always was great in Nola and i had some nice night going out with friends,
i was also invited by Ashton to join one of their dinners, which was really nice
all in all i had a great show (without having a booth) and i think that my show results are much better then the average company who spended a lot of money to have booth's and staff present at the show.

Fabrica de Tabacos "EL LAGUITO" La Habana

And yes this is the birthplace of the Cohiba Brand Fabrica de Tabacos "EL LAGUITO"
unfortunately you can't visit this factory as a tourist but I had a meeting with the Director of El Laquito, my friend Arnaldo Ovalles Briñones so i wanted to share some thoughts about this famous cigar place.
Here they make a big portion of the Cohiba brand, not all but the better stuff is made here, this factory does maybe 2.5 million cigars a year and i have to say that i saw some nice aged tobacco, in a lot of factories in Cuba you see young tobacco but in here in El Laguito they receive the better stuff, apart from the tobacco i smoked some nice cigars too, i smoked a lancero (see picture)which wasn't great and i smoked the New Behike, which is the newest release of Habanos in the legendary Cohiba line, i smoked the BHK 54, the one i smoked was fresh but still one off the better (fresh) cuban cigars i smoked so far, it was not a powerhouse but a well balanced medium and smooth smoke which i think will be much better if aged a little.
All in all this is a really nice place to hang out, as always the people are super friendly the only thing what is somehow disturbing is the speakersystem throughout the factory where you hear the terrible voice of the Lectora talking about politics.
i hate politics so i am getting tired if it's pushed up on you, sorry but i had to say it, anyway apart from that it's great, cigars are made really nice with triple cap head, every single cigar is draw tested and the quality control is really up to the highest level, i have the feeling that despite a lot of people think that the cigarrollers in Cuba are not motivated to make good quality, here in El Laguito they are, now if you ask me that i would pay $ 20 for these cigars, i have to say no,
the quality is for sure better then Cuba's average but of course you pay for the name. But that's not only with Cohiba's or Cuban's in general, i feel the same with product from davidoff, OVERPRICED
I don't like to pay for cigars but i love it if someone gives them to me, and that's exactly what they did, so i enjoyed them much better.

Cuba

It's always a pleasure to travel to Cuba, maybe Cuba doesn't make the most consistant cigar in the world but yes, they have tradition, end March i went down to Cuba to meet with my friends from Tabacuba & Habanos, besides visiting Pinar del Rio i took the time to visit some of the factories in Habana, so this brought me to one of the oldest and most famous Partagas factory ones owned by the Cifuente Brothers, if you enter this factory you think that the time has stand still, it looks probably exact the same as 60 years ago, only the people have changed, here they produce the world famous Partagas cigars.
I had the pleasure to meet the people who run the factory, and exhanged thoughts about cigar making, blending, cigar construction & quality control, the Cuban cigar industry is conducted by the instituto del Tobacco in San Antonio, here they conduct the growing blending & making of the puro cubano,
To help you directly out of the dream, blends are not made in the factories anymore , this is done in the institute of tobacco, they workout the blends and if approved the orders are given to the various departments involved, who will then supply the needed tobacco to the factories and instruct them what to produce out of it, this is todays reality.
On quality control there is some improvement and it's for sure much better then 10 - 15 years ago when cuba had a lot of draw issues, today the mayority of the premium brands are subjected to individual draw testing, only aspect which i found less spectacular is that Cuba is not to much strict in using the same wrapper on the same cigars, let me explain; in todays wrapper variaties you have Criollo 98, Corojo 99Habana 2000 and some new seeds called HVA (Havana Vuelta Arriba) and Corojo 2006
which are seed type's which came out of intensive investigations of the institute,
you might think that for every blend they choose a certain wrapper, but what surprised me is that for the cuban's this isn't important for them
"color & texture" are the way to go, this results in that for the same blend / brand, the wrapper might be a Criollo 98, Corojo 99 , HVA or whatever is available as long the Color & Texture match is similar they are OK.
What they say is that tastewise there might be a little difference, but they are all from the same seed family so the final outcome in their opinion is so similar that they feel it's OK to work like that.
I thought a lot about this issue thinking of all the Non Cuban cigar manufacturers who are worring themselfs by going crazy about wrappers, consistency, flavor etc etc while Cuba has the name and wave's all the worries away by just going by color & Texture.
Despite their opion my personal believe hasn't changed, i believe that it does matter to look into seed & Flavor to make consistant cigars, where is do agree is texture but then more in the difference between the crop's, some crop might have differences between the texture of the various primings, in some cased the veins are more pronounced or the leave contains a little more oil but apart from that i really feel that that all the aspects need to be as similar as possible, Flavor, Color, Texture and if possible even shine but this is part depends also mvery much on the roller,if a roller applies the wrapper leaf , he or she can let the shine come out more by keeping the leaf under more pressure while applying, the only risk of doing this is that by leafs with lesser texture the wrapper might crack while smoking, since the binder & filler bellow put's pressure on the wrapper when heated up.

Let me get back to the differences in texture between the various primings & crop's
by giving an practical example, currently we are using a cuban seed wrapper grown in Ecuador which came from the first 2008 crop stage grown between May & August, when i was inspecting the same primings grown in the same periode of 2009 i saw a big difference in texture, the priming 5-6 of 2009 didn't had the same texture as the 5-6 priming of 2008. To get the same texture i had to move up to priming 7-8 from 2009.
Now as a manufacturer you have to look, feel, smoke this and make sure to pay attention to this every time since the 2009 crop came out more fino due to more rain
so the average leaf texture was a more thin had lesser veins and lesser oil contents then the 2008 crop.
Lesson is that if you don't pay attention and just buy based on primings you go wrong, this need to be checked from crop to crop to ensure consistancy.
Rather then that usage of different seed type's for the same blend is out of the question for me.
Now it's time to smoke something but stay tunned i will write more about this trip, since i visited much more places and was present on the birthday of the late Alejandro Robaina who passed away 3 weeks later.

Cigar Box Bottom Stamp

Here our boxstamp we use for our own products.
i think it is good to have so the product can be always tracked back to us the manufacturer, for private label brands we don't use it unless the client want's to have it.

Cigars

Cigars are in my blood, my grandfather used to make cigars and his father did it also,


unfortunately the circumstances didn't allow my father to make them, only sell them for a while


i picked up the art and make again handmade premium cigars made out of the best possible tobacco's and as much as possible to my own taste, you see the trick is to make a cigar which is like by the mayority of the smokers.


It's not possible to satisfy everybody but if you can create cigars which favor the mayority of the smokers you have winner.


Todays Cigar business is tough !! every country is making new rules and regulations to stop people from enjoying a good handmade cigar.


we didn't give up and we will not give up to try to show the world that cigars are something different then cigarettes, this are two complete different things all together and they shouldn't be placed in the same corner.


we hope, by writting about our passion and sharing our thought that we can reach and teach people about our love to the leaf, stay tuned so you learn more about wonderfull gift of god