Tatuaje Mini Mum

Initial Thoughts

This is the final cigar for the October/November pairing series The  Tatuaje Mini Mum is the final cigar from the Tatuaje Little Monsters set. This is also the miniature version of this year’s release “The Mummy”, which came out in October. According to Tatuaje this is similar to their black-label blend with slight alterations. I haven’t had the chance to dive into their black-label blend yet, so I can’t tell you if it compares at all. What I can tell you is all about this cigar!

Looks

Let’s start with the closed foot on the Tatuaje Mini Mum. I’m guessing this is a trend this year, to offer closed foot and shaggy foot cigars as a way to differentiate yourself from others. I’m still on the fence about it. Call me a traditionalist, but I like to be able to smell the foot of the cigar before I light it up.

The wrapper is a beautiful brown Nicaraguan criollo. Slightly veiny with some rather large ones running the length of the wrapper. It has a beautiful sheen to it though. The head is capped rather nicely minus one spot that looks as if some glue seeped out, oh well I’m going to cut that section off anyway right? It appears to be a beautiful triple cap holding all the flavor in. The band is similar to all other Tatuaje bands, simple. A background color of gray and white lettering. No indication of the name of the cigar. All it says is, Tatuaje and little monsters. Simple, but it gets the point across and it causes people to go out searching for more about this cigar. I would assume everyone would refer to this as the ‘Grey Label’, but because it’s a limited release, I would bet they are going to be hard to come by.

Function

I’m always worried about closed-foot cigars and how they’ll smoke. I know I won’t be able to test the pre-light draw, which always perturbs me. I rolled the Tatuaje Mini Mum through my fingers and gave it a nice pinch test. This one has been sitting in my humidor longer than others, and I have been adjusting my humidor to find exactly what humidity I prefer my sticks at. Right now they are at 68% in case you’re curious!

I used the ole-capped back cutter to nip the tip of this cigar. The double blade pinched the tobacco a little too much and left a ridge in the head. It shouldn’t affect the smoking, just makes it look a little wonky. Oh well, I’ll power through it, right? Well by now you know I can’t take a very effective pre-light draw so I’m going to have to skip that section, I’m sure you guys don’t read this far down anyway right? 🙂

Smoking

Ok, I finally get to light up this Tatuaje Mini Mum. With it having a closed foot you want to make sure and spend extra time toasting the foot to get all that extra wrapper leaf lit and burning evenly.

Luckily this wrapper went up quickly and was burning super fast. A lot of the time I have issues with the closed-foot cigars, so I have to say I’m impressed with how quickly this one went aflame. This Tatuaje Mini Mum started off very impressive. A nice even burn and actually burning quicker than I assumed it would. I had to throttle down my smoking because I was afraid it would start burning hot and begin to taste bitter and gross. The first third had a nice burn line, the only issue was the ash was very flaky. No, not in the way you’re thinking, it didn’t schedule a herf and then just not show up. It always shows up on time and never cancels a hangout. (Haha anyone?… Ok I’ll stop with the jokes) The ash was very light and just didn’t hold together very well. This always bothers me. I love to see a nice tight ash and not one that flakes and has big cracks in it.

I was pleasantly surprised that this Tatuaje Mini Mum burned perfectly all the way through. I only had one issue and it was in the final third. I had to relight one side that just completely went out on me. It was kinda weird because I smoked all willy-nilly and then I looked and one side was completely out…Weird.