I recently had the opportunity to talk to Juan Martinez from Joya de Nicaragua about lines the brand offers and what they each were inspired by in our latest episode of "Smoke Rings."

[Tyler Caldwell]: We are very pleased to have Juan here with us today to talk about some cigars in Joya de Nicaragua's portfolio.

[Juan Martinez]: Thank you, my friend. Thank you for having me.

[TC]: Always a pleasure. So right now I am smoking the Cinco Decadas. What can you tell me about this cigar plus the Cinco line of everything else that's associated with it?

[JM]: Joya de Nicaragua is what we call the original Nicaraguan cigar as it was the first factory to have been established since 1968.

Today we have four main families of cigars. We have our Obras Maestras, which includes the Cinco Decadas. We're going to talk more about that. We have the Antaño line, the Joya line, which is more of a contemporary lineup, and then the Clásico line.

Obras Maestras Line

In the Obras Maestras we have our commemorative or milestone cigars. The first one that we released was Cuatro Cinco and all of them play with the numbers, meaning the "four five" or 45th anniversary of the brand. Cinco Decadas means five decades in Spanish and it was a cigar that we introduced as part of a 50-year celebration of Joya de Nicaragua in 2018. And it's a very special and unique cigar because it uses tobacco that we've aged for 10 years or more.

This cigar in particular is legitimately the tobacco we've aged because, I know this for a fact, when I started in 2007, in 2008, we started thinking about the future. Up to that date, we had never celebrated any achievement or relevant milestone. My father, the owner of the company, was very humble in that sense but we decided that we should start thinking about the future. And in 2008, we saved bales of tobacco. We signed the bales and we asked our team not to touch that tobacco.

We saved it for 10 years when we introduced the line in 2018. Obviously, we then continued aging the tobacco but that's special because it not only celebrates, it commemorates the 50 years of Joya de Nicaragua as a company, but also of the Nicaraguan cigar industry. It was in 1968 that Joya de Nicaragua jumpstarted what is today the most beautiful and the most powerful producing country of cigars in the world, which is Nicaragua.

That's a commemoration of those 50 years of the company, of the country as a producer and a testament to the love and the care of the Nicaraguan cigar makers.

[TC]: Okay. What can you tell me about the blend on the cigar?

[JM]: Those tobaccos are quite special. The wrapper is Nicaraguan, the fillers are undisclosed as always because we want to make it a mystery and protect the integrity of the brand, but we use Nicaraguan tobacco. We are specialized in working with Nicaraguan tobacco, so it's basically a Nicaraguan Puro but it has its special origins inside of Nicaragua.

[TC]: What I find interesting about the flavor profile is that it is a full-bodied cigar, but it's more medium strength. There's notes of red, sweet wine with black pepper touching in the background. It's just incredibly delicious and I bet this would go really well with a nice, red wine.

[JM]: It goes well with some deeper, heavier flavors like espresso or a good, pure chocolate. It covers your palate with that cocoa butter, so it's more of an elegant, refined smoke, not your typical everyday smoke. It is one that you'll spend your time contemplating.

[TC]: After this release, what came next?

[JM]: We had Número Uno next after Cinco Decadas. Número Uno is a special blend because we never intended it to be a marketable brand, but it came to be because we had it as an event-exclusive cigar in 2018.

Coincidentally, when we were celebrating the 50th anniversary, we also had this special cigar that you couldn't get anywhere else. It was a cigar that we had originally developed as a gift for the Nicaraguan government to give out as Nicaragua's official cigar. We blended it thinking about the Nicaraguan government asking companies, like rum companies or chocolate companies regularly, for gifts to take for their travels, to bring to the dignitaries, to the Emperor of Japan, and so forth. We designed this blend to be able to give something to them, a cigar that was accessible for everybody but it would reach the highest levels of government policy of diplomacy in 2013.

This is a cigar you couldn't buy anywhere. A renowned blogger came to one of those events and got the cigar and enjoyed it, and they named it the number-one cigar of the year even though it was not accessible to the market. That blogger was with Halfwheel, and because of that, we got a lot of requests and we brought it out as a regular-production cigar.

It's called Número Uno because it won the number one spot and secondly because in the format, the size originally was named Number One Vitola. It's a very interesting cigar to smoke and a very successful one. It's one of our best-selling cigars.

Antaño Line

Then we also have Antaño, which is one of our legacy brands. It was introduced in the year 2000, and it was the first cigar to actually work specially with Nicaraguan tobacco exclusively. Back then, in the early 2000s, Nicaraguan tobacco was not as known as it is today. Now, almost every renowned cigar is either made in Nicaragua or uses Nicaraguan tobacco. But back in the early 2000s, the story was completely different.

With his team, my father developed Antaño as a pure Nicaraguan cigar, or Nicaraguan Puro. The tobacco is from the same plot of land in Estelí, Nicaragua. It's rich, intense, and very rustic in the profile sense. It's not very balanced on the edges, with high intensity, full body, and full flavor.

That's one of our best-selling cigars in the United States because it was also the cigar that opened up the space for fuller-bodied cigars. Now we have four expressions of the Antaño. We have the original Antaño, the Antaño Gran Reserva, which is the same blend but aged five years, the Dark Corojo, which is a super full, bold cigar, using two leaves of Ligero, which makes it a heavy smoke, and then we have the Antaño Siete, which is the lighter version of the Antaño. It's still full-bodied, but with a Connecticut-shade wrapper. That's the Antaño family.

Clásico Line

Last year, we introduced back to the United States the original Nicaraguan cigar, which is called Joya de Nicaragua Clásico. And that's been the original since 1968. It's a very special cigar because it's in the milder end of a Connecticut. It was the cigar that was the official cigar of the White House of the United States in the early 1970s.

During the Nixon administration, it was the cigar that was gifted to the official dignitaries when they visited the White House. For a country like ours, it's quite special to say that the product was so popular and so recognized that it was considered the official cigar of the White House in the 1970s.

That went until 1972/1973, but still has that reputation and that name. It's our best-selling brand outside of the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. That's the cigar that they smoke. And that's the Joya de Nicaragua Clásico.

[TC]: It's a phenomenal cigar. Over the years, I've learned to like a little more milder, creamier Connecticut-style cigars. What I like about that cigar, and a selling point of mine that I've always told customers, is that it's like when you were a kid and you'd walk into grandma's house when she just made fresh-baked cookies. That is the flavor profile to me. It's a creamy, oatmeal sugar cookie aroma. It's an absolutely incredible smoke.

[JM]: That's a beautiful way of putting it, man. I appreciate that. It has a beautiful price-quality relationship. It's an everyday smoke for those who like flavor without too much strength. Those are three cigars that we're very proud of.

[TC]: I would also like to add on to that, with the Clásico, there is a newer version of it, too.

[JM]: Yes. Clásico Original is the lighter version. It has a Connecticut-shade wrapper, but it always had a sibling with the same blend and a Criollo, which is a Habano-seed wrapper. That makes it a little bit fuller in body, but still with the creaminess and the flavor that you like.

Both of them are available now in some stores that we call Club de Amigos. You guys are part of that, of course, so they're available here at Smokingpipes.

[TC]: We talked about the cigar that I'm smoking. Let's let the folks at home watching know a little bit about the special cigar that you're smoking.

Cinco de Cinco

[JM]: This is Cinco de Cinco and this is our newest brand. It came onto the market last year in 2023. It's a special cigar. During the pandemic, almost all of us had an existential crisis because of it. Our company had a lot of time to reflect and think about what the future would hold. There was a lot of uncertainty.

One of the things that we did is we came back and we started talking more virtually with a lot of people. We realized that up to a certain point, we had been very focused on our production about what we like. The reality is that we don't owe ourselves to us. We owe ourselves to the consumers. We wondered about how to work on something that paid tribute primarily to the cigar smokers out there.

Between 2010 and 2020, before the pandemic, we had a program called Cigar Safari. Basically, you would go down to Nicaragua and you would spend some time with us and with Drew Estate. You spent four days in Nicaragua learning about tobacco, learning about blending, and learning about cigar making. As part of our factory tour, we had a session that was called the blending session. It was an exercise for cigar consumers, media, distributors, and retailers to learn about the blending process and create your own blend from dozens of options.

As part of that activity, you end up being the creator and master blender yourself. We did that for a bit more than 10 years, and in total we had around 2,500 visitors that did that part of the tour. As part of the session, you get your pack of 10 cigars with your custom name and a certificate that says that these cigars were blended by you at Joya de Nicaragua and that they are authentic.

While developing Cinco de Cinco, we thought, why don't we go back to what people wanted in their own blends? We took those records, got an algorithm, and we tabulated them, and we chose the blend that people wanted or gravitated toward most. We improved and perfected the blend, but it was inspired by the most popular and desirable blend that people during those sessions got.

[TC]: That's really cool.

[JM]: It has a Mexican wrapper with Nicaraguan binder and Nicaraguan fillers as per the preferences of what people wanted. Although we produce it, it is a creation of the people for the people.

[TC]: That is a really cool project, man, it's a great way to pay homage back to the consumers who have spent decades now supporting you.

[JM]: Yes, they are the ones who ultimately decide to walk into the shop, grab their card or their cash, and pay our bills. We all owe ourselves to them, so we wanted to pay homage to them.

By the way, it's an emerald green. We discovered this in the process. We were celebrating 55 years. We place emerald, which is a gem, with the word jewel, which in Spanish is Joya. The emerald is the jewel to celebrate 55 years. When you reach 55 years of marriage with your wife, you have to give her an emerald. That's why we played with the emerald green idea.

[TC]: It's a very cool cigar. That's awesome. Juan, it has been a pleasure.

[JM]: Thank you for having me here.

[TC]: It's always fascinating to learn about cigars, which is my hobby. The folks at home love watching the content and learning about cigars as well. Everyone at home, thank you for watching. Go to Smokingpipes and check out Joya de Nicaragua cigars, and let us know which one is your favorite.