Cigar Review: My Father El Hijo

Last year, with considerable mystery, a website for Tatuaje Anarchy sprung up. As we first revealed, the cigar was an exclusive cigar made for the West Palm Beach-based Smoke Inn chain of cigar shops. That cigar (reviewed here) was the first exclusive made to celebrate Smoke Inn’s 15th Anniversary.

Proprietor Abe Dababneh has since followed up the Tatuaje Anarchy with more exclusive blends. Currently available is the Padrón Anniversary 1964 SI-15 blend, a thick toro size of the popular Padrón Anniversary line available with both natural and maduro wrappers. Coming in August is the My Father El Hijo, produced at Don Pepin Garcia’s My Father Cigars factory in Estelí, Nicaragua. (A final release, by Fuente, is due this Fall.)

El Hijo (Spanish for “the son”) is 5.5 inches long with a ring gauge of 52. It is box-pressed—a first for the My Father line. The cigar features an unfinished foot, where the last quarter inch or so is just filler with no binder or wrapper. The blend consists of a “select 2009 Ecuadorian habano” wrapper with Nicaraguan binder and filler tobaccos. When it goes on pre-order sale in late July, El Hijo will come in boxes of 15. Only 650 boxes are being made.

I smoked two samples for this review. Both were solidly built, good-looking cigars, framed by a double bands (a classic My Father band on top with a second pastel orange El Hijo band on the bottom) and the unique unfinished foot.

The initial flavor, created from the unfinished foot before the wrapper starts, is a combination of salt and black pepper. As it progresses, it displays complex combination of heavy cedar, butter, spice, and earth.

The cigar has great balance and creates some seriously dense smoke. It’s medium-bodied at first but then trends towards a more medium to full profile. El Hijo has an extraordinary savory quality. Construction is completely problem-free with a sturdy ash and an even burn.

Ultimately, I was thoroughly impressed by El Hijo. I’ve always enjoyed the original My Father line, and I largely expected this cigar to differ only from the regular line in size and shape (as many store exclusives tend to do).

To my surprise, I found this to have a little something extra than the standard My Father blend, that I can only describe as a denser, more full-bodied edge. That twist on an already exceptional blend earns the My Father El Hijo our highest rating of five stogies out of five.

[To read more StogieGuys.com cigar reviews, please click here. A list of other five stogie-rated cigars can be found here.]

–Patrick S

photo credit: Stogie Guys