r/EverythingCigars

Vegas Robaina Don Alejandro: age 8 years

Hi everyone,

Im using Aqara RH sensors for quite a while, which I have integrated in my Apple HomeKit through Aqara Hub and HomeKit Hub (Apple TV basically). This allows me to access RH sensor data anytime (temperature and humidity), anywhere, both from Apple Home and the Aqara App.

Now Im building a cigar app, basically like a Vivino but for the cigars named Paradigm, as you might guess, ("scan > identify > review > get recommendations" for cigars flow PLUS humidor PLUS cigar shops and lounges map, etc).
And I Im now building a new feature to allow viewing the RH sensor data right inside the cigar app, in the relevant Humidor tab, with notifications when the humidity is out of range, statistics, etc.

So my question is: if you guys are using smart sensors, what are they? I would love to add support for more of those if that's possible from the sensor's side.
Also, if you have any suggestions, please bring them up. I would love to hear those.
In the screenshots below is how this feature would look once live

Had my first Acid Blondie for my first cigar, having never smoked tobacco. At first it was kinda off putting, made a mistake of inhaling on accident and boy did I learn my lesson 🤣 smoked er all the way down this afternoon and it was actually quite nice. Definitely gonna be smokin on some more of these and some others.

They just opened up a Holtz cigar company up the street from my house. I’m going up to the mountains to enjoy the weekend till tomorrow night. Can’t wait about to burn a cigar on my way up an hour and a half drive may have another one after that. Good times.

Not sure what the vibe is here about Privada Club - I was recently introduced to them through a contact in Nicaragua.

After just the first 1/3 of the cigar, I can tell you I wanted more - balanced flavors, peppery, chocolate, and some mild spices. All the flavors came through in the retro-hale; a really enjoyable stick.

Last half of the smoke, all the flavor intensified nicely - it's a blend between an everyday smoke and an end-of-the-week smoke to kick off the weekend.

Paired with a mocha Latte and the barista's test sample of strawberry smoothie. The smoothie and cigar were an ok experience. Coffee and tea remain my preferred pairings.

Arturo Fuente OpusX Forbidden X Amor Sensual

Some things are named with more confidence than they deserve. This isn’t one of them.
There is something inherently ridiculous about a cigar called Amor Sensual.
It sounds like something ordered from the back pages of a magazine your mother wouldn’t want to find under your mattress. Add Forbidden X to the name and you’ve crossed from cigar branding into the territory of late-night cable television.
Carlito Fuente has never exactly been afraid of innuendo.
So I went into this prepared to forgive a little theater.
Then I put the cigar to my lips.
And the damn thing started flirting with me before I even lit it.
There was sweetness on the wrapper. Not the cheap, obvious kind that announces itself like too much perfume at last call. Something quieter. Lingering. It stayed on my lips just long enough to make me wonder whether I’d imagined it.
I hadn’t.
The tapered figurado offered virtually no resistance on the draw. Effortless, almost suspiciously so. After lighting, smoke poured from the cigar in absurd quantities but somehow remained light—ethereal even. The aroma was intoxicating.
Sensual.
There really isn’t another word for it, which irritated me slightly because it meant Carlito had already won the naming argument.
Half an inch later, the sweetness had changed.
Then it changed again.
I stopped trying to define it.
There are moments when reviewing a cigar becomes counterproductive. You can spend so much time dissecting the experience that you forget you’re supposed to be having one. This was quickly becoming one of those moments.
By an inch in, I was glued to the chair.
Not overwhelmed. Not pummeled with nicotine or pepper or some desperate attempt at intensity. Embraced.
The cigar seemed to be wrapping itself around the evening.
Bliss is an obnoxious word. Euphoric is worse.
Unfortunately, both were accurate.
At some point I realized this was becoming dangerously close to a religious experience—which, from what I understand, is more or less what Carlito intended.
If so, mission accomplished.

The Seduction
I had smoked an Ashton ESG the night before.
An excellent cigar. Velvety smoke. Magnificent aroma. So unmistakably connected to the high-end Fuente vocabulary that I had previously wondered whether, without bands, I could reliably distinguish an ESG from an OpusX.
I would like to formally retract that statement.
I could tell the difference.
Not immediately because of cedar or pepper or some obscure tasting note I’m supposed to pretend I can identify with forensic certainty.
I could tell because this cigar was doing something to me.
The ESG had impressed me.
The Amor Sensual was affecting me.
That’s different.
Years ago, early in my return to cigars, someone handed me a Deadwood Crazy Alice. I didn’t realize at the time that it was flavored. I just knew the damn thing was addictive. Every draw begged for another.
The Amor Sensual somehow awakened that memory.
Except this wasn’t Crazy Alice turned up to eleven.
There is a 13 on the band, so let’s call it thirteen.
It possessed that same compulsive pleasure, except instead of achieving it through obvious flavoring, the Fuente was delivering an extraordinarily sophisticated tobacco experience.
And just when I thought I understood what it was doing, it changed the rules.

The Affair Gets Complicated
Toward the end of the first third, the smoke began gaining weight.
What had been abundant but featherlight became thicker. Richer. More substantial.
Then, almost as quickly, it began lightening again.
And the cigar changed almost completely.
Anise.
Well, not exactly anise.
Anise-adjacent.
That distinction sounds pretentious until you’re sitting there desperately trying to explain something your mouth understands better than your vocabulary does.
It wasn’t black licorice. It wasn’t merely spice. It was sweet and aromatic and vaguely herbal, occupying some strange territory between familiar and foreign.
Then it started disappearing.
Underneath it came warmth.
And then an old friend returned.
Sweetness.
Except it wasn’t the same sweetness from the beginning.
This one was darker. Older. More complicated.
Dates.
Raisins.
Currants.
The anise hadn’t completely left either. Every so often it flashed through the darker fruit before vanishing again.
And this was when I realized the Amor Sensual wasn’t simply transitioning.
It was remembering.
Flavors weren’t being discarded as the cigar progressed. They were being introduced, explored, abandoned and later resurrected in different forms.
It was becoming less like a progression through thirds and more like a conversation that occasionally returned to something said an hour earlier—except now both parties understood it differently.
That’s a hell of a thing for rolled tobacco to accomplish.

The Final Third
Eventually the seduction acquired teeth.
Pepper appeared in the back of my throat. My tongue and mouth began tingling. The cigar that had spent most of the evening whispering was finally raising its voice.
But it never started shouting.
And then something happened that I had never really experienced before.
I took a draw.
Enjoyed it.
Exhaled.
Waited.
And another flavor appeared.
Then another.
Little intermittent bursts at the back of my mouth long after the smoke had gone.
At first I thought I was imagining them.
I wasn’t.
They were echoes.
Ghosts of flavors I’d experienced twenty, forty, sixty minutes earlier suddenly appearing for a moment before disappearing again.
The spaces between draws became part of the cigar.
That’s when you know you’re in trouble.
Because now the bastard has figured out how to occupy your attention even when you’re not smoking it.

The Goodbye
Eventually, Amor Sensual began to mellow.
It didn’t collapse. It didn’t turn bitter. It didn’t crescendo into an obligatory explosion of pepper.
It simply began to leave.
The flavors that had been so vivid earlier in the evening became increasingly distant. Every so often one would reappear—just for a moment.
A little sweetness.
A suggestion of dark fruit.
Something aromatic.
Then gone.
They felt less like tasting notes now and more like specters.
It reminded me of a flashback of a lost love from the past.
Not the relationship itself. That’s over.
Just some completely ordinary moment your brain decides to resurrect years later without permission—the way she laughed at something stupid, the smell of her hair, a Sunday morning neither of you realized would someday matter.
For a second it’s perfectly clear.
Then it’s gone again.
That’s what the final portion of this cigar became.
And I didn’t want it to end.
I smoked it beyond the point where dignity suggested I should probably put it down. The cigar had been reduced to a ridiculous little nub between my fingers and I continued negotiating with physics for another draw.
Eventually there was nothing left to negotiate.
One final pull.
One final orange glow.
And after everything—the ethereal opening, the evolving sweetness, the heavy smoke, the anise, the warmth, dates and raisins and currants, the pepper, the tingling palate and those strange ghostly echoes—
it kissed me with sweetness one last time.
The same idea with which it had introduced itself before I ever struck the match.
Then the ember went dark.

Amor Sensual
I’ve smoked cigars that were flawless.
Padrón can make a cigar with such mechanical perfection that you occasionally wonder whether tobacco has somehow been subjected to Swiss engineering.
I’ve smoked cigars that were extraordinarily complex.
I’ve smoked cigars with flavors I desperately wanted to experience again.
And I’ve smoked cigars whose construction deserved admiration almost independently of the tobacco inside them.
The Forbidden X Amor Sensual was something different.
I became attached to it.
That’s a strange thing to say about an object specifically manufactured to be destroyed.
But perhaps that’s precisely the point.
A cigar begins dying the moment you light it.
You know how the relationship ends before it begins. The only question is whether what happens between those two moments justifies the loss.
For nearly two hours, this one demanded my complete attention and rewarded it. Every time I thought I understood the cigar, it revealed another dimension. And when it finally ran out of things to say, it didn’t simply stop.
It lingered.
Then it left.
I don’t particularly care what number someone wants to assign to that experience. Ninety-four. Ninety-six. Ninety-eight. Numbers are useful for things that can be measured.
I didn’t want this cigar to end.
That’s my score.
And as the last orange glow faded, Amor Sensual gave me one final kiss of sweetness to remember it by.
Somewhere in the Dominican Republic, Carlito Fuente is probably smiling.
The son of a bitch knew exactly what he was doing.

My mother had recently visited the Dominican Republic and brought me a gift. Can anybody help with if these are good?