I had a chance to catch up with Steve Saka again at the very end of PCA 2026 at the Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust booth to learn the upcoming releases he has in store this year.

[Shane Ireland]: Thanks for chatting with us, Steve. It sounds like you guys had a good show and there's a lot of new stuff coming soon.

New StillWell Star Cigars

At the top of my list I'm most curious about is the reformulated and repackaged StillWell Star.

[Steve Saka]: Yeah, when we launched StillWell, it was a pretty innovative product. No one had ever done that before and taken the quality of pipe-tobacco blends that you guys do at Cornell & Diehl and put them into a top-shelf, premium, handmade cigar. And when we launched it outta the gate, it did really well. But it became pretty clear after the end of the second year that customers really liked the Aromatic with the sweet tip and the Holiday releases. The other ones, not so much.

[SI]: Right, right. As far as pipe tobacco goes, that was the esoteric stuff, like Bayou and all that.

[SS]: Yeah. It was part of what made the project unique. My favorite was the Bayou and it was the one that nobody bought.

I still believe in the concept and Aromatic and Holiday were growing. I started looking at the comments, and what people wished for. We made the next Holiday in a smaller format. That's something they had been asking for.

They also wished the Aromatic was more aromatic and more pronounced. Look, there's a limit that you can go to, 'cause you have construction and combustion issues. If you want something really Aromatic, smoke a pipe. In the end, this is a cigar.

[SI]: This is a different experience.

[SS]: So I went back to the drawing board and adjusted the Aromatic one to hopefully make it more aromatic. I made the smaller size that everybody wanted. Kept the original, took the Holiday, and said, oh, we'll just make the Holiday blend available on the shelf all the time. Same deal. One the original size and the smaller size.

And then, I just couldn't give up on English. Even though English was a commercial dog the first time, we changed the cigar blend a little bit, which kind of helps to soften the blend a little. It knocks a little bit off the Latakia. It's still there, but it's definitely much more of a milder English, I think. And it has a sweet tip too.

Honestly, that's the combination that's the money maker for me. I think people are gonna be very happy with them. Sweet English is a little bit out of the dark.

I also totally reformulated the sweet tip. We all do pretty similar things to make sweet tips; really there hasn't been much change in 30 years. One of the things that always bothered me about sweet tips though is it always got a little synthetic in the end. I really wanted to knock that out of it. I'm actually more interested in what consumers think of the new sweet tip. I wonder if they'll notice. We'll see. It'll be interesting.

I hope we don't lose the people that like the Aromatics and sweet tips. I think these are better than any of the ones we've ever released before. I hope maybe some people that totally hate StillWell will revisit and dip their toes in again, at least to try the English.

[SI]: It's a unique experience. Even when all the StillWells to begin with were a unique experience, this one is special.

Muestra de Saka Lengua de Suegra Culebra

There's a new Muestra de Saka. Another pretty ambitious project. That's technically the first Culebra you guys have done?

[SS]: Yeah. It'll be the last, probably. It's a Culebra. It's a novelty item. Most Culebras are made with Panatelas and short fillers because it makes it easier to blend and they need to be malleable. I wanted to make an all-long filler one, and I'm not the first. Davinoff's done it. Tatuaje's Old Man and the C, that was a classic one.

I wanted to make a really nice, robust blend that burns well, holds the ash, draws well, and that's got a lot of flavor. One real problem was that the blend I wanted to use was a 40 ring gauge blend, which is way bigger than the 28 you're supposed to be using. Going bigger was creating so much technical difficulty that we just couldn't break the cigars; the wrappers were cracking, so I ended up using a really ugly Broadleaf that is super thick, all veiny, and splotchy, but it's super flavorful.

We didn't put a fancy band on it and left it really rustic with the twine. It's a really good cigar that I think people are gonna really enjoy smoking for the taste and for the flavor. You can share it with three friends, smoke all three yourself at the same time. You're not supposed to, but I like that idea.

The bad part about the Culebras is because of them being so thick, we have to make four cigars to make one Culebra. Even when we have changed the wrapper to what we're using now, we still lose about 25% in the braid. The Culebra couldn't exist if we didn't do that. It's all part of the deal.

[SI]: It is.

Cosmic Corona Sampler

And the other thing that I'm personally excited about is the Cosmic Corona Sampler.

No secret, us at Smokingpipes, both the staff and a lot of our customers, we love the small sizes. We're weird like that.

[SS]: Yeah. Your customers might be that way, but the reality is, 90% of the retailers won't even buy a Corona. When we first launched Sobremesa, I had a Corona and I learned my lesson really quickly. I've never released a Corona in another single one of my SKUs, even though I like it.

I get away weirdly with 6" x 48 vitolas. It is my favorite size. I've even heard consumers refer to it as a Saka. There's Churchill, Robusto, and then there's Saka. We have it in almost every single one of our lines, some iteration, or if it's not 6" x 48, it's 6.25" x 46. We had that kind of thick Lonsdale format.

But the Coronas? No, it's like trying to sled uphill.

[SI]: Yeah, for sure.

[SS]: Two years ago, I did a Lancero collection that had 10 unbanded Lanceros in it, and retailers bought that. You think selling Coronas is hard? Try selling Lanceros. It was such a home-run hit that we actually had to stop taking orders 'cause we couldn't make that many Lanceros. It was crazy. So I thought, if I can do that with Lanceros, I bet I can get 'em to do it with Coronas. Why not?

The Corona's even better because there's Sobremesa, Solita Red, Sobremesa Brûlée Blue, Mi Querida, Triqui Traca, Sin Compromiso, and more, plus two other Coronas that were designed to be Muestra de Sakas that I never released. We don't sell Coronas, but by putting 'em in the sampler and also putting two of each, it's like putting cheese on your veggies.

It's a win for me because I like Coronas, it's a win for the consumers that like Coronas, and it's gonna work for these retailers too.

Sobremesa Brûlée Blue Tapa Negras

[SI]: So what else is on the horizon that you could talk about? That's a lot right there.

[SS]: We have the Sobremesa Tapa Negras. Connecticut Shade with Brûlée Blue. It all stemmed from a factory visit in Honduras in the '90s. I was there and I was smoking a Fuente Between the Lines, and I learned what a Tapa Negra was. It's where you take a really mild cigar and you some sort of heavy tobacco, Broadleaf, for example, and put a swathe on the head, and then when you're smoking it, the palate's coming in contact and you're getting the flavor of that richer, heavier tobacco, but you're still smoking a mild cigar. So it gets you more flavor without any of the extra burn or bite.

Fast forward six or seven years, I'm at JR Cigar and we had this line; Lou wanted to make a limited-edition cigar. Long story short, we did a La Escepción Generation One and sold 2000 boxes.

Then we did another 2000 boxes, which was Generation Two, and sold out. We then did a Tapa Negra in the third generation, sold all 2000 boxes just like we did the other times, but the difference was, we had so many people wanting to get more. I said, Lou, we gotta make more. He goes, nope. We said it was 2000 boxes. It's limited.

[SI]: That's it.

[SS]: Yeah, so we went on to the fourth generation, and that killed the brand because nobody wanted a new one. They just wanted the Tapa Negra third generation.

In 2008, I was President of Drew Estate and I talked to Joya de Nicaragua about what they could do, and they released the Clasico. It is the Connecticut blend that they have been making since the early 1970s. It was the blend that used to be the cigar of the White House blend. Even though it sells really well internationally, it just wasn't selling well in the United States anymore. I said, well, hey, this is a perfect cigar to do a Tapa Negra on.

I told 'em what it was. Let's call it Cabinetta, we'll put it in cabinets, and we'll do this. So they made the Cabinetta, which was a Tapa Negra. Right. They did a packaging change on it, but that brand's been on the shelf for years and is still being made 16 years into the future.

Brûlée Blue is the perfect cigar to do it with. People like to say I'm copying Joya. First off, that was my idea for Joya, and they were copying the cigar we did at JR, and I got the idea from a guy named Frank in Honduras. I don't think Frank came up with that in a fever dream. Let's get real, people. We roll tobacco into a tube. It's all brown. Nobody's inventing anything.

[SI]: Yep. Everything's been done.

[SS]: Right. We're not reinventing the wheel. But here's the thing, this is a Brûlée Blue and tastes like it. That's a Cabinetta. You might like that better, but they're two totally different cigars. We did Sobremesa Brûlée Blue Tapa Negras in a Toro and a 5.625" x 48.

New Dunbarton Cigars in 2026

Last year we lost Fritanga, a slightly more spicy version of Red Meat Lover's. We just put that blend this year with the Beef Stick, so now there's a Spicy Beef Stick.

[SI]: Oh, nice.

Steve, thank you so much. This has become a bit of a tradition for us to chat at the end of PCA shows. We're looking forward to these releases in 2026, and hope you all are too. Let us know in the comments what you're excited about.