CIGARS ON THE TERRACE
Tuesday 18th November at 18.30 | Ribbon Bar & Terrace | £30.00
A cigar at Christmas is always greatly anticipated. An even better thought now is one in November.
At what will be the valedictory gathering of 2025 for those at the Rag who indulge in the dark art, members and their guests have, thanks to Hunters & Frankau, the chance to savour something relatively new from the mother island. The Vegueros band was launched internationally in 1997 having previously been available for four decades before only in Cuba, dedicated to the generations of farmers that have cultivated tobacco in the Pinar del Río region.
In 1961, a prison in Pinar del Río was converted into the Francisco Donatién tobacco factory, where many different cigars and cigarettes were made. Included in the production was a range of cigars designed purely for domestic use, offering more intense flavours than most of the cigars sold abroad. These local cigars became known as Vegueros.
The Vegueros Centrofinos dates back to 2013 when there was a complete review of the offering. Quickly the cigar emerged as the flagship of what began half a century earlier.
Paired with this will be some coffee-infused vodka from Neon, distilled in Goa, India using wheat and natural spring water. The coffee is from the shaded hills of Karnataka, where Arabica beans grow beneath monsoon skies before travelling to India’s Malabar Coast, where they breathe through months of sea wind, swelling, softening, and turning pale gold in the humid air. The result? A coffee of rare balance with low acidity, rounded in body and representing calm, cocoa-like warmth, most welcome as autumn turns to winter. There is just a single infusion as the start of distillation, so the flavour is embodied rather than representing an after thought.
Altogether, a very welcome preface to the season of jollity.