The American Cigar Making Tradition

This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. And now joining us is Drew Newman, the great-grandson of the founder of the oldest family-owned premium cigar company in the United States to tell us the story of cigars in America.

Here's Drew with the story. Most people don't realize that the United States has a rich cigar tradition that dates back to the 1600s. The first crop of cigar tobacco was planted in the Virginia colony in 1612.

And at the time of our American independence, every colony grew tobacco and many of our founding fathers, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were tobacco farmers. One hundred years ago, Tampa was the cigar capital of the world. Tampa was known as Cigar City and there were 150 large cigar factories just like ours here in Tampa that made more than 500 million cigars by hand each year, just in Tampa. To give you some comparison, today there are approximately 300 million premium handmade cigars sold in the United States each year that are made in Central America and the Caribbean. But a hundred years ago, one and a half times that amount was made just inside the city limits of Tampa. But in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, many of these factories here in Tampa closed and one by one, they moved their production overseas to developing countries, primarily because the way we make cigars, it's so labor intensive that the labor savings of having overseas productions really helped them lower their costs and be more efficient.

And so one by one, we realized as the other factories were closing that suddenly my family and I had the last cigar factory left in the Cigar City of Tampa. And we're very proud to be here, very proud to continue the American cigar tradition, but doing so is at an added cost. Labor is more expensive, materials are more expensive, but we think it's worth it to keep the American cigar making tradition alive. We roll cigars today just like my great-grandfather did a hundred years ago.

The process hasn't changed one bit. It's slow, it's labor intensive, and because we are dealing with nature, every single cigar is different. Generally speaking, it takes about three years and 300 pairs of hands to handcraft a single cigar. The process starts in the farms. Beautiful farms that are here in the United States are in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and here in Florida as well that grow beautiful cigar tobacco the same way for generations. Farmers plant the seeds in a greenhouse and then transplant them into the field and after about 60 days the plants grow tall and thick and beautiful and green and lush and each leaf is picked off those plants and hung in a barn where the tobacco naturally wilts.

It dries out, it loses humidity, it crumples up a bit. And then from that point the tobacco is taken down leaf by leaf, put into bales, and then sent to be fermented naturally. And all we're doing with these natural leaves of tobacco that are grown is simply putting them into piles. We put them into big piles of about a thousand pounds each and add a little bit of water and mother nature combines the water with the tobacco and the leaves get warm. And as they get warm, the natural ammonia in the leaves releases from the tobacco and what's left is a beautiful aroma and taste of natural tobacco leaves.

That process of natural fermentation is slow. It takes roughly eight months of simply letting the leaves sit in the pile, turning the pile every eight days so they have an even fermentation. And then finally we get to have leaves that are thin, that are silky, that are smooth, that are beautiful, that we can then gently roll into cigars. The cigar rolling process is really interesting. I like to compare it to wine because we make cigars just like the great winemakers make blends of red wine. What we do as cigar makers is we take different leaves grown on different plants and different farms in different years and we blend them together to create unique and different tastes. Within a single tobacco plant grown on a farm, you can have 40, 50, 60 different grades of tobacco because some leaves are longer, some are shorter, some are thicker, some are thinner. The leaves near the top of the plant get more sun so they have more nutrients so they taste stronger. The leaves at the bottom are thinner and have fewer nutrients and they burn better.

And so it's our job as cigar makers to understand these natural variations in leaves that are grown, blend them together, harness this natural variation and create unique blends that consumers like. None of this is written down. There's no school for cigar making.

There are no rule books. It's simply a tradition that's been passed down from generation to generation to generation that we are working very hard to maintain. And great job as always by Joey bringing us that story and the production. Superb is always in a special thanks to Drew Newman whose great grandfather was the founder of the oldest family-owned cigar company in the United States. By the way, be sure to visit the J.C. Newman factory, El Releau, with your family. That's in the Tampa region if you're ever in the area vacationing or heck, you're on your way to Disney and you're passing through. They have some great exhibits and loads of activities for your family to enjoy.

The story of American cigars is told to us by Drew Newman, the great grandson of the oldest cigar maker in the country, here on Our American Story. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history from war to innovation, culture, and faith are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more.