CAO Black Bengal

Many years ago, the future creator and founder of CAO, Cano A. Ozgener, started a hobby and ended up making some of the best-known Meerschaum pipes in the world in his garage. While traveling to different trade shows, he noticed the need for humidors and started making those as well. In the 1990s, during the cigar boom, he was introduced to Carlos Toraño who then introduced him to Nestor Plasencia. The rest is, well, history as the pair began creating unique blends that have developed into the cigar brand that we all know and love today.

The CAO Black in your shipment today is one the first regularly made cigars by CAO and can only be found at a handful of selected retailers. Handmade in Honduras, each stogie is individually wrapped. The cigar starts with a stunning dark brown Connecticut-seed wrapper grown in Ecuador, is bound with a zesty Nicaraguan Habano leaf, and is finished with a well-aged three country blend from Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Take off the cedar wrap and use it to light the cigar and you’ll get notes of cedar, cream, and pepper with a semi-sweet clean finish. A perfect anytime cigar, we enjoyed ours with an espresso.

Honduras has been a tobacco growing and cigar manufacturing area for hundreds of years, but it was the Communist revolution in Cuba that really put Honduras on the map. In the 1960s, many Cuban cigar makers fled their homeland and arrived in Honduras to re-establish their way of life. The immigrants took advantage of the climate, soil, and geography, which were well-suited to tobacco growing, and began producing high quality cigars. The center of the Honduran cigar industry is the city of Danli and the nearby Jamastran Valley. The majority of the world’s pure Corojo tobacco is grown here, now that Cuba has stopped production of this iconic, spicy, and rich variety in favor of Corojo hybrids. Other important areas of Honduran cigar production include the Talanga Valley, Copan, and Trojes.