CAO Brazilia Samba Cigar Review
During my recent visit to Fort Lauderdale, I picked up a CAO
Brazilia Samba cigar at the Oasis Cigar shop in the Sawgrass
Mills Outlet Mall in Sunrise, Florida. Last night, I had the
pleasure of lighting up the cigar and enjoying it, which took a couple
of hours.
The CAO Brazilia Samba is a torpedo
style cigar made in Nicaragua. It has a dark brown wrapper with an
oily sheen an pleasant texture. Only the tiniest of veins is
visible. The binder and filler are Nicaraguan. The wrapper is
Brazilian, hence the name of the cigar.
The CAO Brazilia
Samba cigar is very firmly constructed and has a very solid
feel to it. It’s 6.5″ long with a 54 ring gauge.
Unlit, the aroma is pleasing, with a hint of a leathery smell to
it. The draw is very easy. The cigar lit easily as
well. I found that the one I reviewed did not burn very
evenly. At first, I attributed this to a poor lighting job my
part, but after evening it up a bit and ensuring that the entire end was
lit properly, it continued to burn unevenly at the bottom, with the
wrapper more or less refusing to burn. Perhaps the bottom got too
moist in the humidor, I don’t know. I didn’t expect that from a
CAO cigar.
The ash from the CAO Brazilia
Samba was extremely firm, which I expected given the firm
construction. It was a very light gray, almost white, with trace
amounts of other gray colors here and there.
The flavor was a bit
intense in the first half inch or so, then mellowed out a bit. The
smoke was very thick and white, visible all the way from my mouth to the
ceiling. My wife found the aroma of the smoke pleasant, as did
I. Nevertheless, she asked me to close the sliding glass door to
the house while I sat on the screened-in porch smoking it with a beer
(the “Grotten Brown” Belgian Ale that Michael Jackson the beer
expert rated the best of 2005). The flavor to me was very good,
with a hint of a pleasing leathery taste and a very light peppery touch
to it. A couple of unintentional breaths of the smoke into my
lungs (I normally do not inhale the smoke into my lungs, like – I gather
- most of you) were tolerable and didn’t make me want to cough like many
cigars do. I got a mild “buzz” off the CAO
Brazilia Samba, far less than I did from the Perdomo Reserve
Cabinet Series I had last week in Florida, but noticeable (and no, I’m
sure it wasn’t the beer).
The cigar lasted at least two
hours. I lit it some time after 8pm and it was going well past
10. If you plan to smoke one of these and don’t plan to be drawing
on it constantly, make sure you allot a couple of hours to enjoying
it.
All in all, I’d say this was another fine cigar from
the good folks at CAO, confirming my evolving opinion that
they’re one of my favorite manufacturers.
On a 1-10 scale,
this is at least a 7.5. I’d rate it higher, but
the uneven burn and the intense initial draws take it down a peg for
me. If I have another in the future and the burn is more even, I’d
move it to an 8.