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The Cigar Broadly speaking there are two kinds of Cigar, Cuban (CC) and Non Cuban (NC). In general amongst cigar circles conversations are normally geared towards the enjoyment of high quality hand made cigars, please note that a cigar produced with tobacco hailing from one country will often be called a "Puro" though this term is often simply used as a default name for CC's.
Though the discussion of machine made offerings does take place and is not generally frowned upon. Along with Cuba other counties with strong cigar production are The Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Though other countries do produce cigars also such as the USA, Indonesia, Holland and to a much lesser extent France, though this list is not exhaustive. You can further split cigars into Hand made and Machine made varieties. Common machine made cigars that you may be aware of are King Edwards and Henri Winterman, without trying to offend or start a debate these types of cigars are generally considered of lower quality than Hand rolled Cigars. Once upon a time Cuba produced quite a few machine made cigars but this trend has slowed and this is now reserved for the small tinned "Club" and "Mini" Cubans. So in relation to Cuban cigars, if you are buying a full sized Cuban you are fairly safe in your assumption that you are buying a Hand made product made of 100% quality tobacco which is something that can't always be said for their machine made cousins.
Construction of cigars is split into stages and this can be broken down to the Filler, Binder and Wrapper.
Filler: The filler is the inner most bundle of tobacco that makes up the bulk of the cigar and can be described as Long or Short. In a long filler cigar the whole filler is made of intact rolled tobacco leaves where as in a short filler, it is made for cut up and re formed trimming.
Binder: This is the rough tobacco leaf that holds the filler together.
Wrapper: This is the high quality best looking smooth leaf that holds everything together. In some NC cigars this can be dyed to give a particular appearance or even flavoured. Though flavouring is a matter of personal preference flavoured cigars tend to not be appreciated by purists (Not always the case) yet flavoured cigars can account for the most expensive cigars available on the market.
Finally is the Cap, this is the section of the Wrapper that seals one end of the cigar, incidentally this is the end of the cigar which will need to be cut to put into your mouth. A cap can have multiple layers and a triple cap is often seen as a mark of a quality roller.
Now for shameless use of someone else's size, shape and colour picture (I hope it's not breaking copyright!) full credit goes to the owners of the picture and their brand is on it, I didn't make and don't own this picture.
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