 Plus: what’s with all these Mob cigars?
Los Angeles, August 25 – We get questions:
J.B. writes, “I enjoy smoking cigars, but some cigars leave an aftertaste in my mouth that could last for a day or two. Brushing my teeth and tongue doesn’t help much. Is there anything on the market that might get rid of the aftertaste?”
Excellent question and one which has confounded smokers for years. My own approach to this problem focuses on eliminating the aftertaste layer by layer.
No single product or procedure will completely remove the taste of a cigar. By using several steps to successively reduce the amount of cigar residue in the mouth, any remaining taste can be almost totally eliminated. Try a three-step approach:
• Cut most of the taste with citric acid
This is extremely important. There’s a reason why so many mouthwashes and other products have a lemon, lime or orange taste. It’s the citric acid, which overpowers everything else in the mouth.
It’s hardly fashionable to follow your cigar with Listerine, but there are excellent – and tasty – alternatives. Stay away from the weaker citrus drinks such as sodas and go for more acidic tonics. Orange juice is good, but my favorite is Bitter Lemon.
If lemon extract can cut through grease in the bathroom, imagine what it can do to your mouth! Many manufacturers make this drink, including Canada Dry, but the best – if you can find it – is Schweppes Bitter Lemon in the 10 oz. bottle, served chilled over rocks in an Old Fashioned glass. The combination of lemon juice and bitter quinine is both sour and refreshing and will cut 80-90% of the taste of anything that was in your mouth.
• Give your mouth something else to chew on
After giving your mouth some time to recover from the Bitter Lemon, give your mouth something else to worry about. A couple of options:
> Cereal. If you’re at home, this can be a tasty follow-up to the Bitter Lemon or other citric acid drink. Try a couple of handfuls of Rice Krispies straight – no milk – and see if your mouth doesn’t respond with some glee. Any of the Chex cereals – except Bran Chex – are also good and Grape Nuts is also excellent.
> Cheese. If I’m smoking on the outdoor patio of a restaurant with some friends, we enjoy our cigars after the entree, then order our round of citric acid and then enjoy dessert. A great choice to chase the cigar taste from the mouth is some sharp, hard cheese. Like many Americans, my weakness is for any type of sharp cheddar, but ordering a cheese plate for dessert is quite an impressive way to end any meal.
• Give your cigar the brush-off
Once you have been citric acidified and cheesed up, you can get out the toothbrush and be sure to brush that tongue. By then you should be cigar taste-free . . . or too exhausted to worry about it anymore.
Alternatively, there is a new product on the market called “Close Call” which debuted at the RTDA and uses a patented process which suspends copper sulfate in liquid. It has a light citrus taste and is reported to be safe to “swish and swallow.”
A couple of final thoughts:
• Remember that eliminating the taste in your mouth does nothing about the smell on your clothes and in your hair (if you have any). You’ll need to take separate precautions for this; remember that the silk smoking jacket was invented to keep the smell of cigars off of noblemen. Silk is relatively resistant to the smell of cigars compared with most other fabrics.
• After-dinner peppermints such as Altoids, or special cigar mints (the best known brand is Henry Clay) are strong and can be helpful. Just as effective can be hard candy sour balls or hot cinnamon balls.
Good luck!
Cigars are getting Mobbed up!
Although the Oscar-winning epic “The Godfather” debuted in 1972, cigars are still getting names based on the Cosa Nostra culture and characters.
Just before the Retail Tobacco Dealers of America (RTDA) convention and trade show in New Orleans earlier this month, Caribe Imported Cigars introduced a new version of its La Fontana Vintage, the “Consigliere.” Created in tribute to long-time Caribe executive Sal Fontana (who looks excellent in his usual all-black attire), it comes in sizes named Part I, Part II and Part III, same as the Godfather motion picture trilogy.
Now, the Nat Sherman line will join the game with a new series called “Omerta.” Named after the code of silence used by the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the U.S. to hide their activities from outsiders and law enforcement, it was to have been introduced at the RTDA show, but the distributor – Cigars by Santa Clara – withdrew along with several other distributors over Louisiana state tobacco tax enforcement issues.
Cigars by Santa Clara now distributes the Nat Sherman lines – Host Selection and Metropolitan Selection – and is expanding the brand with Omerta and others to follow. Santa Clara’s Lew Rothman describes it as “brutally powerful” and one of the few cigars to be made with tobaccos from a single farm, in this case the Oliva Family’s La Joya Plantation outside of Esteli, Nicaragua. (Other brands from single farms have been made by Caribe Imported Cigars and Felipe Gregorio, among others.)
The first in the Omerta series will be a 6/18-inch by 54-ring torpedo with, as Rothman notes, “a sharply chiseled point” and a dark, Colorado Maduro-shade wrapper. It will be presented in a unique box made of aluminum, resin and vinyl. There’s enough for the Boss, the Underboss, the Consigliere and three Capos!
It’s the first of several new introductions for the Nat Sherman line, including a new “1400 Broadway” series to salute the address of Sherman’s first store in the 1930s that was a mecca for cigar smokers in New York and around the world for nearly half a century; an addition to the Metropolitan Series called “Bankers,” sized like a roll of cash at five inches long and 66 ring!
~ Rich Perelman
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