REO Chairman Gordo

The REO cigar line was originally released by EO Brands years ago. With multiple giants of the cigar industry involved in EO Brands, there were simply too many cooks in the kitchen and mouths to feed. Eddie Ortega and his partners went their separate ways in 2012, EO Brands closed, and REO disappeared. However, REO had always been Ortega’s brainchild, and thankfully he was able to bring back this delicious line of premium smokes in 2016 for us all to enjoy.

The REO Chairman is a beautifully crafted stick. The cigar's dark Costa Rican maduro wrapper is an evenly colored deep chocolate brown, smooth, with minimal veins and a somewhat oily feel. The cigar lights easily and burns evenly with a firm gray ash. The blend is a mixture of aged Honduran and Nicaraguan long-fillers with a Nicaraguan binder, delivering complex flavors ranging from sweet nuts to mild, mellow maduro flavors, to chocolate with hints of spice halfway through, and culminating in a dry, floral finish. Definitely not one-dimensional, the medium to full-bodied REO is a joy to smoke. Because it's so complex, your favorite bourbon or dark rum will do it justice but an Espresso Martini will also do the trick.

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.