Damn I should of posted this after reading it in the Mens bathroom at the Burning Leaf. It was a Duh did they just say that moment for me........ Another words why would you admit to the scarcity of leaves used when you were also admitting to ramping up production????
http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/16046 July Aug 2011
We wanted to do something different. We wanted to create something that was the best, Maique says. He explains how the project began when he sent people out into the warehouses in Pinar del Río looking for old tobacco;
they found some bales with three years plus age. Some of them turned out to be good bales, and some didnt, he says,
but we kept the good ones for another two years.
With the success of the Cohiba Behike, the discussion continued about adding a permanent Behike line to the Cohiba brand. We knew we couldnt just say it was the best of the best, Maique says. Weve been saying that for 50 years about Cohiba, that it was the selection of the selection. We had to find something new.
He recalls that when he worked in France, he was always explaining to people that Cuba had three main tobaccos in its cigars, the volado for combustion, the seco for aroma and ligero for power and strength. But when he researched tobacco that was used
before the revolution, he came across notations for a fourth variety, medio tiempo, a smaller leaf that only appears rarely, and on the top priming of a tobacco plant.
I said we could use a fourth leaf, the medio tiempo, Maique says.
And, when we asked ourselves what will medio tiempo mean in terms of the cigar? Character. It would be a new component that would add character.
Maique explains how over the years, medio tiempo leaves had fallen out of general use in Cuba, partly because they were rare, usually appearing on only 10 to 15 percent of tobacco plants in a field . He says in recent years such leaves often went into domestic production cigars. Now, they are being selected and kept aside and treated as a separate tobacco for the Behike line.
Could it just possibly be all Behikes from now on will only just be "reproductions" of those first bales that were "special" and set aside? Is there any way that production ramped up 4-5x original numbers but the medio teimpo that was so scarce magically was made more abundant. To me there was a varity of warning signs in this article that seem to be making a awful lot of sense now.....
