After I wrote “Ring Gauge Matters… Mostly,” it got me thinking about the blending process and all the variables blenders must consider to achieve their desired outcome.
There’s a lot to consider.
Because tobacco is an agricultural product, there’s so much variability that the blender has to deal with. The permutations could probably fill a multi-volume set of books. And these are things that we consumers never see.
But as I’ve researched, spoken with many blenders, and now find myself getting involved in a new project, I’m realizing just how much adjustment actually goes into creating a cigar.
For instance, there’s a reason brands usually only publish the wrapper, binder, and filler regions. And you’ll never see them publish the proportions of the filler tobacco used. You’ll also rarely see the specific regions or the primings of the filler tobaccos. Part of that is obviously because they don’t want to give away the exact recipe. But there’s another, more practical reason.
The blender has to deal with several potential gating factors and constraints.
For instance, when I spoke with Luis Barragan of Dunamis Cigars about his Dominion cigar, he shared that he actually wanted the cigar to be stronger and more dominant, hence the “Dominion” name. But Raul Lanuza, who produced the cigar, didn’t have the tobacco on hand to achieve that. So Luis had to compromise.
I assured Luis that the compromise created a spectacular result, but he maintained that he still wanted it to be stronger, and in the future, he may reformulate the blend.
Available inventory is a major constraint, but there are others. Chief among them is tobacco being an agricultural product.
The tobacco a blender used for one production run won’t necessarily be exactly the same the next time around. Even if it comes from the same place and is technically the same tobacco, the leaf itself can be different.
And if the blender’s intent is to maintain consistency between production runs, they must make adjustments to the recipe to achieve a consistent result.
A good example is AJ Fernandez’s San Lotano Requiem line. It was one of the foundational lines for AJ Fernandez, and I remember smoking it years ago and thinking it was good. I’ve gone back to it more recently, and to me, it’s an even better cigar today.
I don’t know what specific adjustments have been made to the blend over the years, if any. But a cigar that’s been in production that long illustrates the challenge. The tobacco available today isn’t necessarily going to be identical to what was available when the line was first produced, yet AJ still has to work toward the intended character of the cigar from one production run to the next.
But sometimes the intent itself changes.
When I recently smoked the Ferio Tego Metropolitan, I was surprised by how much better it was than I remembered. I had smoked the Metropolitan years ago and thought it was okay. The current version was considerably more refined and, to me, a much better cigar.
Michael Herklots confirmed that the change was deliberate. He had adjusted the viso and seco in the blend to bring the profile more in line with modern tastes. In that case, the adjustments weren’t about maintaining consistency. Michael wanted the Metropolitan to taste different.
The same kind of intentional adjustment can even happen between vitolas.
When I spoke with Eduardo Carreno about Auremio, he told me that he deliberately adjusted the balance of viso and seco between the robusto and toro. He wasn’t trying to make the two sizes taste like the same cigar in different dimensions. He wanted each vitola to have its own expression.
So even when two cigars carry the same name and use the same basic blend components, the internal recipe doesn’t necessarily have to be identical. In Auremio’s case, the differences between the robusto and toro weren’t simply a consequence of ring gauge. Eduardo changed the blend itself to produce the result he wanted from each size.
Another example comes from Domain Cigars and the Attenuation.
When I spoke with Daniel Lance about the cigar, he explained that they wanted a very specific expression from the Cajuaca wrapper. They were looking for brightness and energy without adding a lot of weight to the cigar.
But they didn’t get there simply by putting a Cajuaca wrapper on a particular combination of binder and filler tobaccos. Daniel explained that they also used a curing method that’s normally associated with pipe tobacco to get the leaf to behave the way they wanted.
That’s another part of the blending process that never shows up on a blend sheet. It isn’t always about changing the amount of viso or seco. Sometimes achieving the blender’s intent requires changing how the tobacco itself is handled.
Then there are cases where I can taste that something has changed, even when I don’t know exactly what was done.
That happened with the 2026 release of the Super Sea Monkeys. The previous release was chaotic in the best possible way. It was loaded with sweet aromatics, and the profile seemed to be constantly changing and totally unpredictable. That chaos was a big part of why I gave it a 100.
The 2026 version was noticeably different.
It was still really good, but it was much more structured and organized. The sweet aromatics had largely been replaced by more grounded, earthier tones, and the overall experience was considerably more refined.
I don’t know what changed in the recipe, or whether the change was even intentional. But it was a good reminder that when a new production run tastes different, there can be a lot more behind it than simply saying, “This batch isn’t the same.”
Which brings me back to the blend sheet.
You see the wrapper, binder, and filler stats, and they look pretty definitive when you read them on a manufacturer’s website. But after talking with several blenders, I’ve come to realize how little that actually tells us about what went into making the cigar.
There’s simply a lot going on behind those few lines of information. The tobacco available to the blender isn’t static, and neither is the recipe they use to get the result they’re after.
So when you see a blend sheet, know that there’s more to the cigar than the wrapper, binder, and filler.
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