Cigar Aficionado’s Top 25 Cigars Are Coming
After smoking and testing more than 700 cigars throughout the year, the panel of cigar-loving editors from Cigar Aficionado magazine have finished their tastings, assembled their notes and finalized their scores. Now, it’s nearly time to unveil the Top 25, the very best cigars of 2024. We will begin our countdown on Monday, December 16, and new cigars will be revealed all week long.
The testing has been thorough: as with every cigar appearing in the tasting section of Cigar Aficionado (and Cigar Insider, our twice-monthly cigar newsletter) all of these cigars have been tested blind. That means they were purchased by our tasting coordinator, given a code that only he knows, stripped of their bands and then rebanded with a generic label concealing the cigar’s identity. The cigars are then given to the tasting panel of editors (the coordinator is not a member of the panel, as he holds the code) and the tasters rate the cigars blind, not knowing the name, country of origin, tobacco blend, price or any other prejudicial information about the cigar. The cigars are then given a score.
For a cigar to appear on the Top 25, it has to first score well in one of our blind tastings. The top cigars are resmoked by our panel (again, they are smoked blind) to find which ones stand out from the pack, which can deliver a consistently excellent performance and which single cigar deserves to be ranked No. 1.
This will be the 20th time Cigar Aficionado has named a Cigar of the Year. The Top 25 debuted in the Jan./Feb. 2005 issue of the magazine.
Last year, the Fuente Fuente OpusX Reserva d’Chateau was named No. 1. To find out who will be No. 1 this year, visit CigarAficionado.com the week of December 16.
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