The Best Coffee Cigars Money Can Buy

by Billy Ferriolo
The Best Coffee Cigars Money Can Buy

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Unfortunately, we can’t spend our whole lives drunk (well, you can and many have tried, but the results are generally disastrous). Occasionally, we need to get things done, so there’s a need for sobriety. Usually, this is in the mornings. And for those morning times, we have an almighty beverage that, if it didn’t exist, we probably wouldn’t leave bed in the morning.

We’re talking about coffee.

Breathe it in… ahh. We can almost smell that steaming earthy aroma right now.

As fall comes in, we’re all about a nice hot cup of coffee at pretty much any time of day, but it’s mandatory when we wake up. Everyone’s got their way they like it, but we can all agree that it’s a necessity once you get old and you’ve got yet another workday ahead of you.

But what about cigars? Where to they fit in to this morning coffee ritual?

Well, many people are perfectly happy to bust a “coffee cigar” out at sunrise, and we don’t blame them. A nice Connecticut shade cigar after breakfast is a tradition that’s older than many of us. Now, if you’d like to have a little fun and break up the same old, same old, why not throw an actual coffee cigar into the mix?

Coffee-infused cigars take the devotion to coffee to a whole new level, and bring a really enjoyable flavor into the mix. If your beans have gotten a little tired, a true coffee cigar will bring back the taste you’ve been missing in a big way. With the essence of that dark-roasted flavor coming in on every puff, you’ll be in coffee heaven before too long.

If you haven’t got any in your humidor yet, we can help out with some quality recommendations below from some of the top brands in the world. Here are a few of the best coffee flavored cigars money can buy:

Tabak Especial

Nowadays, the Tabak Especial cigar from Drew Estate is the go-to coffee cigar for many lovers of the holy bean. The Drew Estate team is super talented when it comes to producing tastefully flavored cigars. Forget dips or injections – these guys are all about infusions like in the best-selling ACID line. It’s a more elegant way to get flavors into a cigar and is a good match for premium tobacco and cigars, which generally deserve sophisticated methodology to properly honor one of the most carefully-cultivated and handled plants on the market.

For the Tabak Especial, the infusion rests on the strength of rich Nicaraguan coffee. You gotta hand it to these guys – they work with whatever comes out of the soil down there in Nicaragua and make some pretty delicious stuff with it. This time, it’s a collaboration between coffee and tobacco, which come together first in the soil, then in the infusion room, and once again for a final time when we smoke and pair it with a hot cup of joe.

Together forever, it seems.

Tabak Especial comes in four fantastic flavor varieties.

Dulce uses a nice creamy Connecticut shade wrapper, and brings sweet and milky flavors. Negra features a dark broadleaf maduro into the mix to emulate darker roasts that sink you into earthy flavor. For the indecisive cigar smoker, there’s also a Café con Leche version that combines the two wrappers for a light/dark combo flavor profile that many people swear by.

The final version is high test, and Drew Estate calls it the Tabak Especial Red Eye. Just like a red eye coffee in real life, this one has amped up the potency with triple ligero tobacco. For those who don’t know, the most potent nicotine content is found in ligero leaves from the top of the tobacco plant. These top leaves drink in the most sun and grow stronger than seco, viso, or volado leaves that grow at the bottom of the plant stalk. By tripling the amount of ligero in the blend, the Red Eye is like a triple espresso in cigar form. Handle with care.

Of course, Drew Estate doesn’t have the market cornered on coffee cigars, so let’s move on. Nub has been putting one out for some time that people really love, and it recently went through a rebrand. Let’s check out the Nub Café’s evolved form, the Nub Nuance.

Nub Nuance (formerly known as Nub Café)

The Oliva family has made quite a number of outstanding blends, but when they’re not busy experimenting with masterpieces, they occasionally unwind by putting out an innovation like the Nub line. Nubs are exactly what they sound like – cigars that are already nubs. Instead of smoking through the first and second third, you start right at the grand finale. It’s an efficient way to cut right to the chase in a sense. Of course, it won’t have been flavored by smoke passing through as it would in a complete cigar, but that’s the difference between your homemade nubs and an Oliva Nub.

This coffee cigar has been enjoyed in years past as the Nub Café. Now it’s evolving into the Nub Nuance line. The rebrand also adds two new flavors: Fall Harvest (pumpkin spice flavor) and Winter Blend (peppermint mocha). Clearly, the line between coffee shops and cigars is blurring quite a bit these days, and we say that it’s just more enjoyment for the java lovers of the world.

Nub Nuance comes in three coffee flavors, referred to as Single Roast (formerly Cappuccino), Double Roast (formerly Macchiato), and Triple Roast (formerly Espresso), so you can decide just how strong a cup you want. Each one is made using a core blend of Dominican tobaccos – it appears that there’s no Oliva Nicaraguan leaf in these cigars. Then, a different wrapper is applied to get the desired flavor.

Single Roast is nice and creamy, with cedar and vanilla flavors invoked by a bright gold Connecticut shade leaf. Double Roast is a bit different, going with a darker Sumatra wrapper. This coffee cigar offers smoke that’s a bit more chocolatey, with earthy sweetness that’s quite satisfying all the way through. For power junkies, the Triple Roast also uses a Sumatra wrapper, but tastes quite a bit darker. Of all the Nub coffee cigars, this is the one that’s best suited for a nighttime smoke.

Reviews tend to be quite similar to those of the Tabak Especial, with scores of smokers finding a new go-to smoke. Something about these rich coffee cigars just grabs people, making them the kind that you want to light up again and again. Good thing they come in boxes!

Want more flavors mixed in with your coffee? Let’s go crazy with the Java coffee cigar line!

JAVA Latte

These cigars are the result of a collaboration between Rocky Patel and Drew Estate, and they go waaaay back. Java cigars first came out in the early 2000s, and they’ve been with us ever since. Year by year, Drew Estate perfected the art of the coffee cigar, releasing batches that deliver some of the richest, but still most balanced coffee flavor possible. It’s a fine line to walk, especially when you’ve got multiple flavors going on like the Java cigars do. Instead of simply being coffee-infused using Drew Estate’s secret process, these also are offered in Mint and cherry Red.

If you’re a flavor junkie and you crave departure from standard coffee cigars, these are a great option.

As with most things Drew Estate, these cigars are built on a blend of Nicaraguan tobacco. If they’re anything like the ACID line, they then head off to infusion, where mysterious things happen to them to make the leaf take on the flavor of coffee. Seriously, Drew Estate isn’t spilling the beans. Instead, they are keeping their secrets, and well they should. If we were making one of the world’s best-selling flavored cigars, we couldn’t be too quick to give up our methods either.

It’s safe to assume it includes coffee beans, right?

Like the other coffee cigars on this list, Java comes in a few different varieties. There’s Latte (with a mellow Ecuador Connecticut wrapper), dark Maduro (which uses a fermented Brazilian tobacco wrapper), and refreshing Mint (which also is wrapped in Brazilian maduro). For the adventurous, there’s a cherry-flavored Java Red that will pique your palate.

Drew Estate is many things, but never boring.

CAO Flavours Eileen’s Dream

Here’s another non-boring coffee cigar. This one isn’t coffee flavored, but it features one of coffee’s best friends: Irish cream. You’ll need your own cup to drink along with this cigar, but rest assured, you’ll get your money’s worth. The Eileen’s Dream blend from CAO cigars is one of the most popular flavored cigars on the market. People have been raving about the signature creamy taste, and if they knew what went into it, they’d understand why this is such a unique treat.

According to CAO, Eileen’s Dream is “infused with premium Irish whiskey, coconut milk, frothed cream and delicately sweet white chocolate truffles.” The combination is exquisite, and turns this cigar into something really special. Not everyone is an Irish Cream fan, so we know that it won’t be everyone’s cup of joe. But for those that like a little Irish with their coffee, this should be a winning pairing.

The tobacco used includes mellow Dominican long-fillers, an earthy Connecticut broadleaf binder, and an exotic Cameroon wrapper. Somehow, amidst all these flavors, the cigar winds up on the mellow end of the strength scale. We’re perfectly happy to find it there. With a strong coffee to drink alongside the smoke, we don’t really need a lot more nicotine in the mix. There’s enough going on in a coffee cigar that brings a full kit to the party – it doesn’t have to whack you with a shillelagh too.

Let’s get one last coffee flavored cigar in before we have to brew another article.

Isla del Sol

Oh my. Drew Estate again? We would say that these guys are certified coffee nuts, but the reality is that it’s you folks who are the real coffee maniacs. If there wasn’t a market for it, Drew Estate wouldn’t be rolling up coffee cigars day and night. The fact that there’s room for three different coffee cigar lines in just one company is all the proof we need that coffee cigars are one of the most sought-after kinds of infused tobacco product.

So what makes this one different? Well, let’s start with the infusion: it’s Sumatra Mandheling coffee bean. As a cigar retailer, we’re always thinking of Sumatra as a place to get wrapper seed (or fully grown wrapper leaf), but it’s a prime destination for coffee cultivation as well. Many a roasted bean started its life as a seed in the soil of Sumatra. Just like we learned in Nicaragua, it seems that earth that is good for tobacco cultivation often is good for coffee too, so the two can be grown in neighboring fields. But instead of the home grown coffee beans that are used in the Tabak Especial blends, Isla del Sol is a coffee cigar that uses imported beans to get a special flavor going.

And while we’re over there, we might as well purchase some wrapper leaf, right? Good thinking! Isla del Sol is a blend of Nicaraguan long-filler tobacco that’s finished off with a gloriously sun-grown Sumatra wrapper. While there’s plenty of Sumatra tobacco that’s grown under the cover of shade (at least the partial cloud cover of Ecuadorian skies), this tobacco was given the full strength of the sun, making it more robust and, at the end of the day, stronger. The leaf is then infused with coffee and the cigar is also finished with a sweet tip for those who toss a little azucar in their coffee.

So, there’s your full slate of coffee cigars. Find a few to try and your next favorite cigar will be on its way to your house before you know it.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some beans to grind. All this writing made us crave a hot pot of the good stuff.

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