If history does repeat itself, “you might wanna pay attention,” musician Quavo once astutely observed. Top-echelon cigar makers, reviewers and smokers are paying close attention to a surprising addition on the premium cigar scene that is repeating history—only in reverse.
The history goes back to the 19th century, when the fertile Black Patch area of western Kentucky was home to indigenous “black tobacco” that preceded burley tobacco for cigarettes. Cigar makers up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers used this tobacco, blending it with “carob tobacco” from the Caribbean and parts of Latin America imported into New Orleans. Now, cigar makers in the Caribbean are importing tobacco from Kentucky, specifically from Eric McAnallen, a genial gent from Pike County, and his Black Patch Cigar Co.
How it all came about is a perfect happenstance involving a trail from Paducah to the Dominican Republic and points in between; weather variances; and blind luck interspersed with naysayers, trial and error, and moments of utter discouragement.
What was outside happenstance was something to make all of us in the Commonwealth truly Kentucky proud.
“It’s all in the dirt,” McAnallen said succinctly of the Black Patch soil in Logan and surrounding counties. According to McAnallen, a glacial wash 12,000 years ago left behind what he describes as “heaven’s garden,” an incredible, nutrient-rich soil ideal for great tobacco and virtually any other crop.
The second factor is another dirt, 1,000-plus miles to the south. Soil in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and elsewhere in that region of the world yields tobacco that doesn’t have the “sweetness,” to use McAnallen’s description, of Black Patch tobacco. And that takes us back to the early history of cigar tobacco in Kentucky. “They knew then you had to blend,” McAnallen said of United States cigar makers and Caribbean-imported tobacco.
Kenbano Tobacco
McAnallen’s venture into cigars began when he helped strip and grade burley tobacco on his father-in-law’s farm in Princeton in Caldwell County, west of Logan County. But it was a small quantity of cigar tobacco he raised for a large manufacturer in Alabama that got his attention.
When McAnallen suggested they produce their own cigars, his father-in-law directed him to the University of Kentucky Research and Education Center’s Agricultural Experiment Station in Princeton, where he had been a consultant. A staff member, knowing the history of the Black Patch and the potential for resurgence of cigar tobacco, encouraged McAnallen and directed him to shipping manifests from the post-Civil War 19th century at the McCracken County Public Library in Paducah. That’s where McAnallen learned about the blending of local tobaccos with Caribbean and Latin American imports. Another Station staff member may have provided the impetus for what was to follow with, ironically, discouragement.
“So then, I talked to the chief dude there,” McAnallen said. “He looked at me and said, ‘You’re not going to do it. You’re going to fail. You don’t know what you’re doing.’
“I know I didn’t know what I was doing, but I wanted to try it anyway.”
McAnallen set about growing tobacco for his first cigars from 2000 to 2003 using Little Crittenden or LC-59 seed at his father-in-law’s farm. McAnallen then hopscotched among cigar makers from New Orleans to Key West and, eventually, to Miami and a Cuban émigré, Nestor Benedict. This cigar maker produced beautiful cigars, but the flavors, a blend incorporating Nicaraguan tobaccos, “were nothing,” McAnallen said. “I about gave up.”
Benedict gave him a key piece of advice: “He said, ‘Listen, it’s finding the right “girlfriend”—other tobaccos to blend,’ ” McAnallen recalled. “You need Dominican tobaccos.”
More important than the advice and critical to McAnallen’s eventual success, Benedict sent Black Patch tobacco to the Carbonell family in the Dominican Republic, documented as the oldest tobacco growers in that country and a major player in the cigar trade.
“About four or five months later, I get a package in the mail. I smoked one of the cigars, and I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” McAnallen said. Benedict’s advice had proved spot on: The Black Patch tobacco, blended with Dominican tobacco, produced a “ta-da” moment for him.
Another component in great cigars remained, however.
“I was still using my father-in-law’s seed,” said McAnallen, referring to the LC-59, but the burn factor—how fast or slow it burned with other tobaccos—wasn’t correct. McAnallen visited the Carbonell farm in the Dominican Republic and solved the problem. They recommended their local seed to pair with the nutrients of the Black Patch soil.
Kenbano Tobacco
After going out on his own with land in Logan County in 2005, McAnallen received Corojo seeds from the Carbonells. Corojo is a premium tobacco first grown in Cuba and popular as a wrapper, or outermost leaf, on a cigar.
“I brought it back in a Marlboro cigarette pack—half a pack—but that was enough to raise 20 acres,” McAnallen recalled.
“It starts with the dirt, but then you have the variety of the seed that’s going to bring the best out of that dirt.”
Having the soil and the seed didn’t mean being home free, as the late Jorge Carbonell well knew. “He said, ‘I hope everything—the stars, the crickets and everything else—lines up for you,’” McAnallen recalled with a laugh.
Nothing did line up, though … at least, not right away. A portion of the Carbonell seeds died in the growing trays when McAnallen returned to Logan County in 2005. In 2006, seeds germinated and grew only a bit before they also died. Enter blind luck.
“I have to have my tobacco inspected to ship it out,” a task that is performed by the UK College of Agriculture, McAnallen said. He and the UK inspector were in the fields when an employee at the Logan County farm told them to jump in his truck because he wanted to show them something.
What McAnallen saw is something he will never forget. “He drove us to the other side of the farm, and there were eight rows about 300 yards long, and this tobacco was 7, 8 feet tall,” he said. “The employee said, ‘I had some of that Corojo seed left, and I thought, What the heck? I planted it, and there it is,’ ” resulting in another “ta-da” moment, but this time on a hugely meaningful scale. That tobacco launched Black Patch Cigars.
“What we figured out in 2007, it was the hottest summer on record, and it was low rainfall, exactly like the Dominican Republic. [The tobacco] was in its environment. The genetics were already there,” McAnallen said. Mother Nature had taken care of the rest.
All that remained was the blending of this tobacco, dubbed “Kenbano” by McAnallen, with Dominican Republic tobaccos from the Carbonells. McAnallen described the importance of this last part of the story in making a great cigar: “Each has its own fingerprint, its own signature. The right combination of blends incorporates all the signatures. What you’ve created is essence.”
The essence in McAnallen’s Kenbano line—using the Kentucky tobacco as “filler,” or the bulk of the cigar interior, with two other Dominican tobaccos—wowed cigar experts. One reviewer was effusive in his praise, describing it as “like a peppery candy bar. It literally becomes lip smackin’ good.”
The Black Patch Reserve Cigar, which preceded Kenbanos, was McAnallen’s first commercial success. It combined a Kentucky-grown broadleaf wrapper with Dominican tobaccos. “Simply fantastic” was one critic’s appraisal.
The sole mistake with the Reserve Cigar, according to McAnallen, was not holding some in literal reserve for later sales after the cigar earned acclaim and success. “Everybody bought them and smoked them up,” he said. “I wish I’d made 1,000 boxes and sat on them, because I could probably get around $500 a box for them. They were that delicious.”
That’s a piece of history McAnallen will be sure not to repeat in the future with his burgeoning line of cigars.
The success of Black Patch cigars surpasses what McAnallen could have imagined, and now he said he’s going “beyond the first, initial goal and dream of what I wanted to do.”
He has, indeed, successfully repeated 19th-century history in reverse, and his hope now is that other tobacco growers in the Black Patch repeat his history. “There’s enough business to go around,” McAnallen said of both tobacco growing in the Black Patch and cigar production in the Dominican Republic.
Online cigar magazine stogierate.com has added the Black Patch Cigar Co. among “auspicious businesses and products” originating in the Commonwealth, along with the bourbon industry, KFC and Papa John’s Pizza.
For more information on the Black Patch Cigar Co., visit blackpatchcigar.com