Cigar Review: Felix Assouline Ego Trip

Felix Assouline may be a new name in cigars, but the team behind it has a long history in the cigar business. The company had a booth at the IPCPR Trade Show for the first time this year, to show off its four cigar lines, all made in Estelí, Nicaragua. (My colleague reviewed their Havana Sunrise Reserve recently.)

Their cigars can be hard to find—I’ve yet to see them on the shelves of any of my local shops—so the company offered to provide me with some samples from their Ego line. According to their website: “Ego is a full-flavored line of cigars. The careful blending of tobaccos from Jamastran, Jalapa, and Indonesia are brought together to create a full flavor cigar that is further enhanced by ‘pressing’ the tobaccos together and aging them carefully before boxing them and shipping them to their eventual home, your humidor.”

Ego comes in a peculiar selection of seven sizes. Five are 6.5 inches long with ring gauges between 54 and 58, plus there’s a Perfecto (5 x 52) and a Cigarillo (5 x 24). I smoked four cigars in the Trip size (6.5 x 54).

The Habano Criollo ’98 wrapper is a reddish-brown color with a slightly mottled appearance. The cigar has a soft box-press (notably, almost every cigar Felix Assouline makes is box-pressed), that makes the 54 ring gauge seem less over-sized.

The cigar utilizes an Indonesian binder and filler from Jamastran, Honduras, and Jalapa, Nicaragua. It features a solid base of roasted flavors, cashew, hay, and wood.

It’s medium- to full-bodied, but the real character comes from the spice notes, which include both black pepper and cinnamon. The flavors are relatively steady throughout, but there’s enough depth to the flavor that it isn’t dull. Construction is free of any flaws.

All in all, my first experience with Felix Assouline made a good impression. While not the most balanced cigar, Ego Trip is well-made, interesting, unique, and, at $7.50, fairly priced. That earns the Felix Assouline Ego Trip a rating of four stogies out of five.

[To read more StogieGuys.com cigar reviews, please click here.]

–Patrick S

photo credit: Stogie Guys