Liga Privada Unico Ratzilla

Initial Thoughts

Every now and again it’s always nice to sit back and smoke a special cigar. One that you can’t find regularly and was given to you in a special place. Today was that day. I’ve been sitting watching this Liga Privada Unico Ratzilla sit and age in my humidor. I was given this cigar on my media Cigar Safari trip down to the Drew Estate factory in Esteli, Nicaragua last March. Finally, I’ve been waiting for a good reason to smoke it. Today, I was able to score a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 20 year from my local wine & spirits store so I felt like it was a great reason to light up this cigar. This Liga Privada Unico Ratzilla has a pretty special story of it’s own. It’s always been a unicorn of sorts. Very difficult to get your hands on them and you can almost certainly not find them in retailers. Usually, you came across this cigar if you made it out to the IPCPR show, or if someone from Drew Estate handed you one personally at an event. Otherwise they were pretty few and far between. Now, according to Drew Estate’s website you can start to find some these on the shelves of ‘Drew Diplomat’ stores. Special retailers that have signed up with DE and they get these Liga Privada Unico Ratzilla as a sort of holiday promotion offer. It’s a pretty cool incentive and payoff to be a Drew Diplomat store I’d say. Overall this is a pretty unique and special cigar. It’s a bit of an odd shape, it doesn’t fall into a standard vitola category. In fact it’s listed at 158mm x 46 so after the conversion to inches it’s around 6.22″ in length. It also has quite a bit of an advanced makeup to it in terms of the tobacco used. I’m going to quote here from DE’s site to make sure that I get it right.

The Liga Privada Único Serie Ratzilla, produced at La Gran Fabrica Drew Estate in Estelí, Nicaragua, features a Connecticut River Valley Stalk Cut & Cured Sun Grown Habano Wrapper, a Plantation Grown Brazilian Mata Fina Binder, and Nicaraguan and Honduran Fillers.

Interesting make up for sure. So let’s jump into it and see what all this smoke has going on for itself. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Looks

Taking a look at this Liga Privada Unico Ratzilla and it appears very similar to the other cigars from the Liga Privada series. The band is identical in design the only difference is the hand-written Ratzilla across the front. One particular detail that I love about this cigar is the flag cap on it. I wished I had asked to have a flag cap on my cigars that I got while on my cigar safari. It’s something that is fairly unique to Drew Estate, I haven’t seen another company do it to finish their cigars, and I think it’s a nice little addition to this particular one. The wrapper on this cigar is that nice dark wrapper that I’ve gotten used to seeing on the other Ligas. It has a gorgeous texture to it, a little bit of tooth and you can even see some veins running down through there. Great looking completion to cigar overall, Looks like it was constructed very well.

Function

I wasn’t able to detect any soft spots rolling this Liga Privada Unico Ratzilla through my fingers. A nice bit of bounce back as well which I always enjoy. I love feeling that texture on the wrapper that I mentioned above on my fingers. Touch is always a nice sense to add to the mix especially when reviewing cigars. I made quick work of the flag cap, even though I was a bit sad to cut it off. My Xikar Xi made quick work as always and soon I was taking a nice long cold draw on this cigar. The draw was excellent, a little bit of resistance, but I was able to pick up some good hints of flavor along the way as well. I actually took about 5 cold draws to really pick up on some of the subtleties this smoke was giving off.

Smoking

After I got rid of the cap it was time to get this Liga Privada Unico Ratzilla rolling and burning. Like all the Ligas that have come before it this cigar gave off a ton of smoke. It’s that rich blue smoke that you love to see in all the cigar ads out there. It just sits around and covers you with it’s presence. Absolutely love it. The ash held of for a little bit, never more than an inch though. I think I actually only got one picture of the ash without it falling off. Even though the construction seemed great and the draw was fantastic, there was something that just annoyed me with the ash. I feel like when a cigar produces that much smoke and is that easy to draw that the ash should be able to hold together a bit more. Not too worried about it other than it’s making me have to wash my jeans now. So that’s a bit of a bummer. The rest of the cigar smoked like a champ, never had an issue with the draw or the wrapper going wonky on me. Just a nice straight even burn throughout and it offered a fantastic smoking experience all the way through.