So today was the day: I ventured into bunching and was curious to see if anything from my internship five years ago had stuck with me.
Well.... I think I was just as unguided as I was back then, but perhaps I understood a little quicker where the mistakes in bunching lie and I think I did after a while a quite good job of putting the bunch together.
However, the last third of putting the binder on the bunch was a challenge again. It took me a while to understand that I had to keep the leaf taut until the end and, above all, that I had to “catch” the cigar and not just drop it.
My first bunch was the blend used for the Montosa Robusto. My masters - Jelinson and Simon - thought of something: Here, I only had to put three tobaccos together for the filler and then apply the binder: Criollo and Piloto from the Cibao Valley, refined with Java tobacco from Indonesia and a Mexican Sumatra as binder.
The second bunch was for the Buena Vista Incognito Robusto, a cigar that I love: it's not called Incongnito for nothing: the tobaccos in the filler are not told! A secret! But I know them now! And am silent as the grave. Anyway, it was a step up...and apart from the thing with the last third of the wrapper (it doesn't stick well to my wrappers), I did quite well again and immediately overestimated myself tremendously...because now came the moment of truth.
I had to make the bunches for the Buena Vista Petit Corona.
My first challenge: there are five tobaccos in the bunch. In the middle is the dark, fascinating Araperique tobacco, a newly invented word from the terms Arapiraca and Perique. The Brazilian Arapiraca is fermented using the Perique method. In Perique, the tobacco is watered and squeezed under high pressure in wooden barrels. The resulting liquid supports the fermentation process, which can last for months.
The tobacco is like a thin, moist thread and must be nicely centered into the bunch.
The real challenge, however, was the size of the vitola: small bunches with several varieties of tobacco are really difficult to blend!
I needed help until the last bunch. Simon was my patient teacher here. Thank you!
So, enough for today, I'm exhausted from the new information and the "manual exercises".😅☺️
See you tomorrow!
Comments