For many cigar aficionados, Drew Estate’s Liga Privada series of smokes has yielded some pleasant surprises over the years. Drew Estate certainly has had its hands full experimenting and sampling blend after blend and vitola after vitola, trying to perfect the ultimate Liga Privada smoke. Over the course of the last decade and a half, the company has produced literally hundreds of tobacco blends trying to hit the bullseye of perfection that’s deemed good enough to merit a public release. Most of these blends have missed the mark, but a few have hit it dead-on but still have not been able to be put into production for reasons of cost, construction restrictions, or tobacco limitations. When this happens, Drew Estate hasn’t discarded what’s been created; the blends are merely set aside (and are usually consumed in-house by the top brass as intermittent attempts are made to try and eliminate the issues that stand in the way of getting the legitimization that a bona fide production release can give them). In 2011, Drew Estate decided to take more concrete action in this regard, and the firm grouped all of these disparate blends into a new Liga Privada line, called Único, to mark their uniqueness from other Liga Privada blends (and from each other). At last, these blends were finally scheduled to be released to the anxious fans and enthusiasts who had for years been hearing about certain cigars and vitolas not being available to the general public.
This edition of the Único line — the Year of the Rat — was originally made exclusively for the cigar lounge that Drew Estate sponsored at the Sunrise, Florida BB&T Center, the home of the Florida Panthers NHL team. The cigar’s name comes from the fact that during the 1995-1996 season, Panther’s player Scott Mellanby killed a rat in his team’s locker room with the same hockey stick he later went on to score two goals with, leading goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck to come up with the phrase “rat trick,” a play on the familiar hockey goal term “hat trick.” Soon, fans started to throw plastic toy rats on the ice each time their team scored a goal until, finally, the NHL laid down the law and made a rules change to penalize teams if their fans engaged in delay-inducing behavior. Nevertheless, the Panthers made it to the Stanley Cup Finals that year, exactly two decades before Drew Estate announced it was sponsoring the cigar lounge.
While a first iteration of this product came out in 2016, it wasn’t widely available until January 2020, to coincide with the Chinese astrological Year of the Rat. At five and a half inches long with a 46 ring gauge, this Corona Gordo-sized stick makes use of a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper, a Brazilian binder, and fillers from Honduras and Nicaragua. The rich, creamy smoke contains subtle touches of black pepper, earth, and wood. Well-balanced, complex, and friendly to the palate, the Year of the Rat is medium-to-full-bodied with medium strength, and it features an easy draw. Order a box of 10 sticks today, and see what kind of a year this turns out to be.