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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 063 of Half Ashed, featuring Unbanded #014 as our Cigar of The Week. This particular cigar was supplied by long time friend of the show Maria Elena González. Here is just a sampling of a few items covered in Episode 063:
News
Barry Stein commented on his future plans in returning to cigar media, and hinted at some future potential for the Kilo (hoowahh!).
Oliva has begun shipping the extensions to their Melanio Maduro line.
Kevin Paige of acigarsmoker.com is reporting that La Sirena is moving production from My Father & La Aurora to Erik Espinosa’s La Zona factory.
The focus of our news conversation tonight was the FDA’s “Deeming document” concerning their intentions toward regulating premium cigars. At the heart of the matter is: 1. whether or not premium cigars will fall under the same classification as other tobacco products, and 2. the definition of a “premium” cigar. Tune in to get the full scoop. To summarize, for those who have any desire to continue smoking cigars, I’d strongly advise you to pay attention here. This is the “other shoe” we’ve been waiting to drop for several years. The time is now. You can find an excellent summation of the document at halfwheel, and submit your comment to the powers that be HERE for the next 75 days (through July 9th, 2014.
Other
In “What We’ve Been Smoking” this week, Craig gushed about what he considers one popular manufacturer’s Magnum Opus (and no, it’s not a Fuente). We covered a few more pedestrian smokes as well
There were a couple of embarrassing stories about myself thrown in for good measure this week….
We wrapped up with a fantastic listener email from Louis Alvarez. He made some excellent points we were happy to discuss on the show. Following that, we gave the final wrap on this week’s Unbanded….and I have to admit I was floored when I saw what it actually was. Thanks again to Maria Elena González for supplying it.
Next Episode
Next week, our Cigar of the Week will be a very special Fuente stick given out at CFC2014. We know little about it, except it’s roughly the same vitola as a Hemingway Classic, and carries their “prototype” X band and a secondary “Destino al Siglo” band. Be sure to check back in next Friday night at 9:30pm EST at Cigar Federation ****We will temporarily only have chat access on our Show Page on halfashed.com. We have outgrown our previous chat, and it has been overloading the server and causing various and sundry issues with our hosting provider. In fact, they shut down our site this week during the show. I have installed a stopgap chat for the time being, but it will not frame into the Cigar Federation page. We will remedy this as soon as possible.****, where you can catch us recording and participate in the chatroom. If you would like to contact us in the meantime, you can reach us through the contact page or at the following emails: [email protected] or [email protected]. Please feel free to drop us a line if you have any questions you’d like answered, comments to make…or even compliments and complaints. We love to get your emails! Also, remember you can always go back and listen to previous episodes, which can be found in the Half Ashed Archive. You can download this week’s audio directly below (right-click “Download” and save), or find us on iTunes to subscribe. Video, as always, will be available at the CigFed Half Ashed Video Archive.
P.S. – If you have unbanded suggestions or contributions, you can get those to us by sending an email to [email protected]. This email address goes directly to my wife, so you can simply suggest an unbanded cigar for her to source, or send me an email to [email protected] if you have something you’d like to send in. I will provide an address to send them. Thanks!