The Return of Alec Bradley Trilogy
One of the cigar world’s more intriguing shapes is coming back. Alec Bradley Trilogy, a cigar that’s pressed like a triangle, is coming back as a limited-edition smoke.
Trilogy has been off the market for more than a decade, so many smokers have never seen one. The cigars have a distinctive press that gives them three sides, and when you look at one from the foot, you see a triangle, rather than a circle (as with traditional, rounded cigars) or a square or rectangle, as with box-pressed or trunk-pressed cigars.
The brand was born from complaint. Alec Bradley brand owner Alan Rubin remembered the words of a colleague who said there were just too many round cigars on the market. Inspired, he went to a hardware store and looked at a saw that was on display. “I went to Home Depot,” Rubin told Cigar Aficionado several years ago, “and they were demoing a DeWalt saw. I said, ‘does that thing cut angles?’ ” Soon, Rubin had created a do-it-yourself cigar mold. He pressed the first cigars himself, then had them made in a cigar factory. Trilogy was born.
The cigars were first unveiled at the 2002 trade show (then called the RTDA). They came in three blends: Authentic Corojo, Exotic Maduro and Native Cameroon. Trilogy was discontinued in 2010, but some people didn’t forget it. In November 2019, Rubin appeared on the Kiss My Ash radio show, hosted by Smoke Inn owner Abe Dababneh, who pushed Rubin to bring back the smoke.
It took nearly two years, but Trilogy is back, blended to mirror the original flavor profiles. The cigars have identical blends on the inside, made with Connecticut seed binders grown in Honduras, and fillers from Nicaragua and Honduras. Where they differ is in the wrapper. Exotic Maduro is made with a maduro wrapper from Jalapa, Nicaragua; Authentic Corojo has a Corojo-seed wrapper from the Jamastran Valley in Honduras; and Native Cameroon is made with Cameroon wrapper from Africa.
The cigars are rolled in Honduras, at Tabacos De Oriente, owned by the Plasencia family.
Alec Bradley will release each of the three blends in a Toro size (6 inches long by 52 ring) that comes 10 per box. There will be 1,000 boxes of each blend, and the cigars should come out later this year. Suggested retail price and exact release date is still to be determined, and it remains to be seen if the cigar will be produced just this one time.
There will also be a special batch made just for Smoke Inn, in a 5-by-50 robusto that will sell for $8.97 and will be on sale in mid-August.
NOTE: The original version of this story had an incorrect price for the robusto. The correct price is $8.97.
