Room 101- Preproduction

[Brooks W]

When this new Camacho cigar was announced, the immediate reaction I had was that it was just one more stick that was being promoted to death that would never live up to it's billing. ("The Room 101 Cigar collection will be a blend of attitude, culture, celebrity, and some of the world’s finest tobaccos" screams the press release...)

The fact that the Room 101 cigar is a joint project with Los Angeles jeweler Mat Booth (who owns the Room 101 jewelry brand) only intensified the feeling in my gut. On the surface, it seemed to be a cigar that was made ONLY for promotion (*COUGH* Opus Lost City *COUGH*), with the cigar thrown in merely as an afterthought...

Oh, how wrong I was...



The cigar itself sports a binder from Honduras and a filler with a blend from Honduras and the Dominican Republic, but the big news in this stick is the wrapper, which uses an exclusive seed variety they call "Semilla 101" (also from Honduras)...Due to be released in September, it will come in six sizes (25 to a box), each named for a different area code in the United States (Editor's Note: I have included the cities for each zip codes for purely informational reasons, they have no bearing as far as I know on the cigars or where they are to be released or anything like that...If it was me reading this review, I would wonder about which zip code each one was and obsessively look them up, so I figured I would do the work for those who think like I do ~brooks]:

The 213- 5.5x44- MSRP $7.00 (Los Angeles, California)
The 305- 5x50- MSRP $7.50 (Miami, Florida)
The 323- 6x50- MSRP $8.00 (Los Angeles, California)
The 404- 6x54- MSRP $8.50 (Atlanta, Georgia)
The 702- 6x54- MSRP $8.50 (Nevada)
The 808- 6x60- MSRP $9.00 (Hawaii)

(One other interesting note is that a portion of the proceeds from the Room 101 cigar sales go to the Wounded Warrior Project.)

The wrapper on the cigar is a nice medium brown, and has very little oil on it...smells of tobacco (I really hate to keep repeating that) and it is very firm when squeezed...The Preproduction version I smoked did not come with a band of any sort...

After lighting, I got just a bit of pepper for a few puffs (no spice, just pepper) which fairly quickly morphed into a great earthy creaminess that was extremely balanced and pleasant...this lasted for pretty much the entire 1st third...



Right around the start of the 2nd third, the pepper was reduced even more (it became more of a background element at his point) and the earthiness turned almost gritty (ie, it lost it's creaminess for the most part)...not an unpleasant taste, but it definitely made me take notice...



The last third was where this stick really surprised me...we were rolling along with the above flavors, just a nice, almost boring amalgamation of tastes when BAM! out of the blue came a huge rush of spice and pepper...it was almost like someone had turned on a switch labeled "SPICE"...I literally sat up in my chair and said "Holy Sh*t"! (scaring my wife who was sitting beside me...she said later she thought I had been stung by a wasp)...it melded wonderfully with the tastes from the first two thirds, and it made my mouth and tongue tingle for a while after I was done with the cigar...



The Bottom Line: The first two thirds of the Room 101 cigar were not bad, but we have tasted it all before...however, when combined with the spice bomb of the final third, the flavors blended into an EXTREMELY enjoyable smoke....it was almost as if the people putting together the cigar wanted to lull you into a false sense of security, then shock you into submission. I was very impressed with the cigar as a whole and the clean finish it had, and this is one I will be waiting to buy when it is released to see if it has the same characteristics...