Petite Corona? NOT a 15-20 Minute Smoke

When I had my first petite corona, which was a Tatuaje Havana VI Verocu, I thought to myself, Dang! It’s a little cigar that I can power through! Wrong. As I puffed it up, the draws became hot and exceedingly harsh. The cigar tasted like shit! I decided to slow down my puff rate and was then rewarded with a glorious experience of nuts, tropical fruit, wet earth, a hint of honey, and white pepper. When I was puffing away at it, it was tar, all tar. Yuck!

Then I noticed how slowly it burned in my ashtray. Fuck! After that I just took my time, and it took me close to an hour to finish the smoke down to a nub.

The same went with the Tatuaje Black. I bought a few of them at the Montecristo shop in Vegas and lit one up for the walk home. It was crowded on the streets, even at midnight, and we had to stop at several crosswalks, so I couldn’t puff all that regularly. But I’ll be damned if that stick stayed lit the entire walk back to our hotel which took us close to 45 minutes! And even when we arrived, it still took me more than 20 minutes to finish the cigar.

That experience alone convinced me that even though it may be a small ring-gauge vitola, it still takes time to smoke. That said, if the stick is not tightly rolled, you will burn through it. But for the sticks I’ve smoked in this size, they’ve all been rolled very tightly so they promote a slower approach. Granted, a petite corona will not take as long as a robusto or gordo. But if you think it’ll take only 15-20 minutes, you’re in for a surprise and it won’t be a pleasant one.

But I guess the point of smoking a cigar in general is to slow down; at least it’s that way for me. Even on the golf course, having a cigar helps me relax and slow down, take my time and focus. So even with a smaller gauge cigar, I take a step back, plant my ass down, and simply let the stick take its course and dictate the time to spend with it. And no matter how big or how small the cigar is, if you let it, it will tell you how fast – or slow – to smoke it.