J.C. Newman Ships Yagua

Yagua is a re-creation of a cigar that Lazaro Lopez, general manager of the J.C. Newman PENSA cigar factory in Nicaragua, remembers his grandfather making at his family’s tobacco farm in Cuba in the 1940s. Each cigar is uniquely shaped and bound while still wet, using a Yagua palmiche palm leaf just as it was done decades ago. Every box of Yagua contains a bundle of 20 cigars still wrapped in the palm leaf, measuring approximately 6×54.

“It continues to shock me that Yagua has developed a cult-like following,” said fourth-generation owner Drew Newman. “I didn’t make Yagua to sell. In fact, I didn’t think that cigar enthusiasts would like Yagua because it breaks all of the cigar-making rules. We use an underfermented Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper, blend the filler tobaccos differently, and do not use the usual tools and techniques of a cigar factory,” said Newman. “As the wrapper is not fully fermented, we age the cigars for a full year after they are rolled.”