The Top 25 Cigars Of 2025 Reveal Schedule
It’s nearly that time of year again, the most special season. Anxiety is heightened, shopping lists are waiting to be finalized and celebration will soon fill the air. No, we’re not talking about Thanksgiving, or Christmas either. We’re looking forward to the dates all cigar lovers circle on their calendar: the reveal of Cigar Aficionado’s Top 25 cigars of the year. We will begin our countdown on Monday, December 15, and continue throughout the week.
As always, the reveal is not the byproduct of a year-end project, but a 12-month journey that involves hundreds and hundreds of cigars. All cigars that make the Top 25—as with every smoke tested by Cigar Aficionado—have been blind tasted by our panel. Here’s how it works:
Our tasting coordinator purchases cigars at retail, and he applies a specific code (known only to him) to each cigar. He then removes all the bands from the cigars in the test and rebands each smoke with a generic band marked with the specific code they’ve been assigned and passes them out to our tasting panel of editors. This way, our panel cannot ascertain the identity of the cigar they’re testing. They’re given no additional details, such as the name, country of origin, tobacco blend, price or any other prejudicial information. The tasting coordinator is not a member of the panel.
The editors smoke and rate the cigars blind, independently, each applying their own score.
For a cigar to appear on the Top 25, it has to first score well in a blind tasting in Cigar Aficionado magazine or Cigar Insider, our twice-monthly newsletter. Ultimately, a list of top-scoring cigars from the year is created, the best are selected, brand duplicates are removed and cigars are rebanded and retasted in order to find out which will make it to the Top 25 and which cigar will be crowned No. 1. Each cigar that makes it to this list goes through rounds of blind smoking in a kind of March Madness-like bracket to decide which ones are the best.
The daily announcements for the Top 25 of 2025 will begin on December 15 and carry on through December 19. Each stage will be revealed at 10 a.m. Eastern on cigaraficionado.com. See the full schedule for the Top 25 reveal below:
Monday, December 15: 10, 9, 8
Tuesday, December 16: 7, 6, 5
Wednesday, December 17: 4, 3, 2
Thursday, December 18: Cigar of the Year
Friday, December 19: 11-25
Each stage of the reveals in the Top 10 will be accompanied by video reviews from executive editor David Savona and managing editor Gregory Mottola, alongside the full cigar details and tasting notes.
Last year, the My Father The Judge Grand Robusto was named the Cigar of the Year for 2024, which is made by the Garcia family in Nicaragua. It received a remarkable score of 98 points, one of the highest ratings in our history. In 2023, it was the Fuente Fuente OpusX Reserva d’Chateau, a Dominican powerhouse from Arturo Fuente Cigar Co. Which cigar will take the top spot this year? Will it be from Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic or perhaps somewhere else? Find out starting at 10 a.m., Monday, December 15 on cigaraficionado.com.
For all past winners, see the table below.
Cigar Aficionado's Cigars Of The Year
