Well, thanks again for the advice. Lesson learnt, I guess. Though I gotta say, wasting a smoke like that puts me in a foul mood. It's not often that I get a chance to sit down and have a cigar, so a bad experience really sucks. Not to mention the price I paid for it (not the main criterion but the one missus understands the best).
Anyhow, I wanted to do a review so I was taking pictures as I smoked.
This one was taken when we were still friends. In the beginning, the Hoyo was very pleasant, to be frank. A bit on the spicy side (too spicy for retrohaling) but still an enjoyable smoke. I had a Croatian dark beer to go with it. A decent, malty drink which unfortunately didn't pair too well with the cigar once it turned bitter. The bitterness of the cigar seemed to really accentuate the bitterness of the beer and diminish all of the other components of the flavor.
I was reading The Simulacra by Philip K Dick in whihc, incidentally, the Israeli prime minister, who is toying with the idea of travelling back in time to strike a deal with Hermann Goering, is smoking Philipine hand made cigars (in the next chapter, a more down-to-earth character is smoking an upmann cigar). Funny how I didn't pick up these things when I read it the first time, when I wasn't smoking cigars yet.
This one is from when the cigar had turned harsh and bitter:
I was eating Dalmatian dried figs to battle the bitterness. It worked suprisingly well but even that wasn't enough to let me actually enjoy the cigar. By the way, I could pick up a grassy, vegetal flavor, much like from a RyJ purito (also something I don't really enjoy). At first it was sort of dilluted, burried int he mix but in the second third, that flavor became razor-sharp.
This is the outside of the house where I was treated badly (by the hoyo):
Though I gotta say, despite the harshness, I didn't feel sick (sick as in the feeling you have right before you vomit) by the end as I tend to do with a strong cigar.
