Jonathan Drew spoke with me back in April and told me some details about the Undercrown and where it came from. To paraphrase in my owns words, he told me that Undercrown was honestly born at the rolling tables in Estelí, Nicaragua. Normally on any given day the crew of factory people would smoke Liga Privada all day, unfortunately that became a problem because there simply wasn’t enough Liga Privada product available to do that, so they came up with a blend that would satisfy their appetite for Liga Privada, and so Undercrown was born.
Jonathan Drew had this to say about it in a recent Stogie Review IPCPR video:
“Think of it essentially as the inverse of Liga Privada, when you think of Liga Privada you think of Visos, Secos, Ligeros from different farms, in the old days we could take a little Viso for this farm, a little Seco from that farm and a little Ligero from another farm. It’s not like that anymore, now we have to buy actually farm crop, we have to take the whole thing —Seco, Viso, Ligero and even sometimes scrap. So what we’ve done with Undercrown essentially is we have inversed the fillers, so for instance if I am using a Ligero from the ASP farm in Undercrown, we’re going to switch it from that Liga that we’re using on the Ligero to a Viso here from the same plant. If I’m using a Viso from Nestor from a Honduran farm that I like, on this Undercrown product I’m going to use a Ligero because I’m still buying that whole farm so I need to use all the tobacco.”
