Respect – An American Statement

AKA Cigars is a Boutique Cigar Company highly focused on Quality. Started with the idea and concepts in early 2010 of creating a company that would be known for high quality products, as well as a fun, exciting, and edgy nature.   The idea was to have an American themed company that is for us Americans. Something for all of us to show our patriotism and to be proud of. Currently the AKA Armed Forces Program going on and AKA is also a proud sponsor of the Wounded Warrior Project.  With that in mind, I selected an AKA Respect from my humidor for today’s review.

The cigar has a nice tight feel and was blemish free with a medium brown wrapper.  It punched without problem and lit easily.  There was a pleasant aroma upon lighting.

This cigar is well constructed.  It burned evenly and held a nice tight ash.  The draw was a little hard at first but it opened up after a short while.  The only drawback that I had was that it needed a relight about two thirds of the way in.

There is a lot of heavy and rich tobacco in this blend.  It should smoke like an overpowering cigar, but pleasantly doesn’t.  While some would think it is a full bodied cigar, I characterize it as a medium bodied or ‘lunch’ cigar.  Throughout the smoke I detected earthy and cedary notes with a hint of spice.  As the cigar smoked down, the spice intensified but never to the point that it overwhelmed.  There is ligero tobacco in this cigar and that tends to be both heavy and strong.  I thought the blend here was handled very well to prevent this tobacco from becoming to strong.  In fact, I never suspected this blend during the smoke and only found out about it when looking at my notes for review.

Unfortunately, this cigar is not aggressively priced.  Perhaps that’s because it’s proceeds go support causes taht are near and dear to the company owners.  It is a US company doing business with local stores that favor small business and American ideals.  At $8.25 it seems a bit much for an everyday smoke of this size.  But, I can’t imagine a special occasion, say an American holiday, where this wouldn’t be the perfect smoke.