I'm here with my good friend Robert Caldwell and we're gonna talk about something very special today: the latest entry in Caldwell Cigars' Crafted & Curated line — Forbidden Fruit, as well as an overview of a few of the brand's core lines.

Caldwell's Core Lines

[Andy Wike]: Just to kick us off a little bit, can you talk to me a little bit about what folks can expect from this latest Crafted & Curated drop?

[Robert Caldwell]: Before we dive in, I'll share some context about our core lines. As you know, we built Long Live the Queen first, which was our core line. We had a really good swing at trying to complete a special Caldwell-style, Cameroon-wrapped cigar. In our portfolio, we lean on a lot of Habanos, we have a couple Maduros, and some other alternative tobaccos that we use and have used over the course of time, and Cameroon was something that was always a bit difficult for us because we could never find the right crop of tobacco or big enough leaves. We finally developed something that was really spectacular.

The Long Live the Queen came out originally in a Cameroon wrapper. I think we announced that cigar in either late '21 or early '22 and it quickly became one of our top-performing cigars. It's in a 10-count box and a lot of our stuff's in 24-counts. It was an ambitious project when we brought it to market. I think that there was a lot of hype around it. Guys were very excited and that created a lot of concern, because sometimes when you finally deliver something, even if it's as good as you hoped it would be, people are let down. But it didn't let anybody down. It hit really hard and it stayed in constant motion up until today. It continues to outperform a lot of the stuff in our portfolio.

Then from there, we decided to extend with a Maduro version of it. So this one's featuring a Maduro wrapper. It's an outstanding cigar. I think it leans back on the Queen profile a bit. You'll notice that we have a different shaped label on this. A lot of our cigars are more of an ovular shape. Queen is the same exact label shape as Anastasia. In building this brand, we wanted something that paid tribute to Anastasia in terms of the smooth smoking experience that is very complex, but not overwhelmingly powerful. In addition to that, we wanted to create a cigar that as you're smoking it, you wanna look at it. So nonetheless, we released this Maduro I think about two years ago, and that one did very well.

Crafted & Curated Project

We have a project called Crafted & Curated. Every time I go to the Dominican Republic, I'm doing different things: I'm having meetings, I'm in the factory, I'm checking production, I'm working with packaging. I'm a cigar nerd and I love tobacco, so I consistently play with this stuff. Over the course of time, you develop all these blends using smaller amounts of tobacco and really just have fun, so we decided to start to encapsulate those things and make boxed products and special releases. That's what Crafted & Curated is.

So we haven't done any Crafted & Curated Long Live the Queen to date, just like we never did an Anastasia one, and I started tinkering with a blend actually in a satellite factory of ours at Henderson's factory. There we developed these two blends.

LLTQ Forbidden Fruit Cigars

The first Forbidden Fruit cigar is the Natural Rosado Mexican wrapper. It's a 6" x 60 format, which is a format that I usually don't smoke. When we were working with the blend, we tried it in a lot of sizes and we had a lot of big wrapper leaves, because we knew we wanted to do something big. We were looking at Cañonazo and Double Corona. We tried to play with A's, but the wrapper wasn't quite long enough, so 6" x 60 was something that worked very well, and the blend was showcased very nicely.

These cigars are Long Live the Queen because they fall under that flavor profile of what LLTQ is but the blends are completely different. The tobacco's processed differently, comes from different farms, and so forth.

The Queen Rosado Forbidden Fruit has a similar baking spice type of element to it that I find very prominent in that regular Cameroon. It's got a bit more depth, a little bit more body, and an overall different smoking experience that falls pretty much within the category of LLTQ. That's an exceptional cigar.

And then we have the Queen Maduro Forbidden Fruit. This is a really outstanding cigar. It's heavier in body, it's really rich, and it's got an espresso/dark chocolate thing going on. For me, if this cigar was a Corona size, I probably couldn't smoke it because it would just hit me over the head. It is gonna be more of a medium- to medium-bodied-plus cigar. It's really balanced in flavor and it picks up a lot of the sweetness toward the end.

If you like Long Live the Queen, and I would also say if you like Long Live the King, the original one, they're gonna fall right into your wheelhouse. It's gonna be a similar thesis in terms of the blend profile and everything, but with dramatically different flavors.

We did make these in smaller quantities, as we always do with Crafted & Curated, so it's just a few hundred boxes, all 10 count, and they're gonna hit soon. When they hit, they're gonna move. So if you guys would like to give 'em a try, I encourage you to pick up a box or two.

Again, we haven't done any 6" x 60 special releases and it is quite a weird size for us at Caldwell, but I feel like they just worked so easily together in this size. A lot of guys also complain because we don't really make big cigars, so we decided to make one.

[AW]: That's really cool.

[RC]: I hope you enjoy it as well. I'm smoking the Lancero.

[AW]: I am too.

[RC]: Make sure when you get these boxes that you add a couple Lanceros, 'cause they're very good.

A Larger Cigar For Caldwell

[AW]: Yeah. Awesome. One thing that I'm personally interested in is, you said that the 6" x 60 was the best expression of this blend that you were working on, so I think we often think about that in the other way, like a smaller ring gauge cigar provides a greater proportion of wrapper versus filler, but here it's actually the opposite, right?

[RC]: That is not a size for a cigar that I ever gravitate toward, but in building the blend, I was going first for smaller ring gauges for my flavor and it just wasn't producing what I was looking for flavor wise. This is a unique opportunity that I was able to make a bigger cigar that fell entirely within my palate when it came to flavor, 'cause as we got into the bigger ring gauge sizes, you started getting something that was smoother. It had more balance to it and more complexity coming out of the larger ring gauge. The tobacco that's inside of it wanted to go that route. The blend just fell into harmony, I think, on that much larger ring gauge size.

It's out of my wheelhouse and also out of our brand wheelhouse a bit when it comes to sizing in regard to the flavor expressions that we're looking for. With this one, it just fell into perfect harmony, even in a larger size.

[AW]: That actually makes a lot of sense. If this would've been a Corona, it would've hit too hard, right? So the larger ring gauge does give you a smoother, more mellow expression of that flavor. It's a lungo, not a ristretto.

Special Expressions of the Experience

I think you said something about Crafted & Curated that's interesting. These aren't limited-edition versions of the blend, they're special-release expressions of the experience.

[RC]: Yes. Reinterpretations of what we've already built. With Crafted & Curated, over the course of time, we have had some that came out with no brand identity, just with a Crafted label when we first started producing them. What we've done since then going forward is trying to build products that fall into the wheelhouse that a consumer can identify.

If you like Savages, Long Live the Queen, or Long Live the King, when you see a Crafted & Curated with that primary logo coming from that brand, you should identify right away that that's something that you as a smoker would also enjoy. If it didn't have that primary brand logo on it, then it's just a question mark and it's a new product. We really use it to indicate that the cigars are reinterpretations of the brands people already like, whether its Eastern Standard or LLTK. We do it because we love making cigars, iterating, and having fun at the factory level.

[AW]: Yeah, they're little microcosms of how you approach making and blending cigars, challenging your palate, and figuring out new ways of sharing that. I think you're totally right, it's not something brand new; instead, it's an iteration of your process with years of experience; it's what you do. It's little pieces of your process that we get to share with others, and that's really cool.

There you have it! Two brand-new Crafted & Curated cigars, both centered around the Long Live the Queen experience in a 6" x 60 Magnum format: Forbidden Fruit. This is very genre challenging and Caldwell challenging as a brand, but I think it's such a cool experience of what the Queen is and what it can offer palate wise.

Robbie, thank you so much for joining us and for having this conversation, and I hope you guys at home can pick up a box or two.