Skip Martin Special Interview

Episode Summary

Skip Martin — co-founder and blender behind RoMa Craft Tobac — joins A Cigar Hustler's Podcast for a loose, wide-ranging conversation recorded in person. It opens with life in Nicaragua (the country's new 30–40 km/h highway speed limits, road hazards, and why car accidents, not crime, are the real risk in Esteli) before turning to the factory floor at Fábrica de Tabacos NicaSueño.

The heart of the episode is Skip's explanation of the "pre-industry" work RoMa Craft has taken on over the last three years: buying tobacco further upstream, fermenting and working 30–40% of it themselves, and sorting filler pack-by-pack into as many as 16 grades. That surplus of interesting-but-off-spec leaf is what spawned the Maquette program — small, exploratory releases (the CF project, Mastranza, the upcoming Steel Porcupine) that let the team learn how new tobaccos behave, dial in construction across vitolas, and calculate consumption before a blend ever becomes a core line. He details how the Maquette Mastranza used already-deveined Jamastran/Dominican-style wrapper downgraded to binder, and how they had to start deliberately deveining and drying binder for six months to a year to reproduce the flavor in the core-line version.

Skip also pushes back on the "master blender" label, naming the people he considers true masters — Arsenio Ramos, Hendrik Kelner, Benjamin Menendez, the Padróns, and to a degree Pepín Garcia, AJ Fernandez and Ernesto Perez-Carrillo — and explaining why agronomy and seed work separate them from blenders who only handle finished leaf. He recounts working with Ernesto Perez-Carrillo and how that project reframed his view of another maker's process, and admits he almost dumped the Aquitaine Connecticut and the Wunder|Lust-era blends before humidity and time proved him wrong.

Production talk rounds it out: the mild 15th anniversary cigar for Michael Joseph of Joseph's Cigars and a project for Jeff Moutet in Riverside; why Baka depends on real Mirafell Cameroon and how the Mastranza trademark dispute with the Mirafell family turned into a direct tobacco supply deal; why Wunder|Lust and its Mata Fina are stalled without Philip Schuster's sourcing help; why Aquitaine is the hardest blend to make right now due to scarce high-priming Habano; and Skip's wish list — Aganorsa's authentic Corojo and Plasencia Jamastran, neither of which anyone will sell him. The episode closes with Skip on trust, doing what you say you'll do, the podcasts he listens to (Scott Galloway's Raging Moderates, Pivot, Joe Rogan), and the CH Pod "Cappuccino Assassino" shirt.

In This Episode

1. 01
   Life and driving in Nicaragua
   Skip explains the new 30–40 km/h speed limits, the lack of nearby trauma centers, and why road accidents — not crime — are Nicaragua's real danger.
2. 02
   The pre-industry: buying and working tobacco upstream
   How RoMa Craft now handles 30–40% of its own fermentation and sorting, and how that changed the company's blending options.
3. 03
   What a Maquette actually is
   Skip borrows the architect's scale-model concept to explain small exploratory runs that test blends, sizes, construction and tobacco consumption before a core line exists.
4. 04
   Mastranza: from experiment to core line
   Why the maquette version tasted different, and how deveining and drying binder for six months to a year was needed to recreate it in production.
5. 05
   Is anyone really a 'master blender'?
   Skip names Arsenio Ramos, Hendrik Kelner, Benjamin Menendez and the Padróns as true masters and explains why farm-and-seed knowledge is the dividing line.
6. 06
   Blends he almost killed
   The Aquitaine Connecticut and Wunder|Lust that Skip wanted to dump as unbanded bundles — until humidity and rest turned them around.
7. 07
   Baka, Mirafell Cameroon and the Mastranza trademark story
   How the original Baka relied on Gilberto Oliva's Mirafell Cameroon, and how a trademark collision led to buying Cameroon direct from the Mirafell family.
8. 08
   Upcoming projects and sourcing headaches
   Palestinian-style Sumatra plans, the Joseph's Cigars 15th anniversary, the Jeff Moutet project, Steel Porcupine, scarce high-priming Habano for Aquitaine, and the Corojo and Jamastran nobody will sell him.
9. 09
   Trust, authenticity and podcast picks
   Skip on being guarded but honest in the cigar business, plus the non-industry podcasts he actually listens to.

Brands & Cigars Discussed

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Transcript

- On a metal roof. - Yeah. - Great, you're recording. - Okay.

All right, so we have the one and only Skip Martin in the building. Say hi, Skip. - Welcome. - How are you doing, Skip?

- This podcast is gonna be a little different. Greg, shut up. - Shut the fuck up. - Yeah, we're doing a podcast.

So this podcast is going to be a little different because I didn't know how to prepare for you. Like, I don't know, I can't ask you specific questions. We've been friends for over a decade. So I figured that we would just kind of put this together and kind of go more Joe Rogan style and have some shrooms and just figure this out.

The more politics we talk about, the better, I think. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I just love that.

That'd be amazing. Nicaragua recently reduced the speed on the highway. The speed limit. To 30 kilometers an hour.

50 and 40. 31 miles an hour. Right. 40 if you're a mass transit or a motorcycle.

So since they changed that, there's actually been still like a thousand accidents or something. So they're saying that it's not going to, that they may not renew it. I don't know. I'm sure it has something to do with, my guess, is the World Health Organization does grants to countries, and I'm sure, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm sure it's somehow tied to some kind of World Health Organization grant to reduce traffic fatalities.

Okay. They've really tried to enforce helmets and a bunch of other things, so I think they're really trying to get the deaths and stuff down. But at the end of the day, the problem is twofold. One, if you're in an accident, you're not anywhere near a trauma center.

Right. Good luck. Right, good luck. So it could be something minor, but you could be seriously hurt and you're not going to make it.

Well, the other thing is, is the roads are like, you know, it could be a cow or it could be a motorcycle with no lights or it could be just a drunk guy walking in the middle of the highway. It's just, it's a dangerous place to, people always say, you know, Nicaragua is really dangerous, you know, is there a lot of crime? And it's like, no, the only thing you really, really have to worry about is getting into a car accident. Right.

So. I mean, you might get your watch stolen or something like that. Yeah, but, yeah. You're not gonna get, you know, mass killings in a elementary school or anything like that.

Right. That would be... S. That's the United States.

That's solely us. We got that... Number one. Number one.

When it comes to that. We're number one. We're number one. Alright, so what's going on in the factory?

You know, I know that you've released a couple things with Sumatra. You're working on this blend with Jeff Moutet in Riverside for his 15th anniversary? Yeah. We're working on a lot of things.

So, the last time we talked was right after we started the pre-industry. Right. There's, I think, four or five hour-long episodes about that interview that you guys could go listen to. So, the last three years have really been kind of focused more on the pre-industry, how we source tobacco, the whole supply chain.

So, we've been buying upstream a lot more. But a lot of times what happens with that is you end up having to work the tobacco yourself. I mean, all the years we made cigars, we just were able to really depend on our partners to ferment and prepare the tobacco so that we kind of got everything exactly the way we wanted it. Now, we probably do 30% of the work, I think, 40% of the work.

So we end up with buying, you know, we end up with tobacco that's not dark enough or that's not the right texture, so like, for example, Mastranza came around because we end up with a lot of San Andreas that isn't dark enough or heavy enough, so that's where Mastranza came from, you know, we have this, the, the CF project we did for you was the lighter side of the stuff from Volstead. It's all great tobacco, but it just doesn't meet the blend requirements of our core line. So, the maquette has been a really interesting thing. You know, we still have plans to do craft.

We have a 5x60 coming out probably the beginning of next year. It takes a long time to roll. Crafts? The craft.

All the elaborated wrapper. We started doing every three months a craft maquette, which is this idea that a maquette is like if you've ever seen an architect where they do the little model of the project they're working on, or a sculptor will do a smaller version of it. So what you're, what they're doing is they're working out the, the materials and the scale and, and those things. Uh, so a maquette for us is, you know, we take a really, you know, sometimes we just find tobacco that is really interesting.

" He's like, "Yeah, it's really unique. " It's like, how much do they have? And they said, you know, 10 bells. And I'm like, well, let's buy five bells.

I have no idea what we're going to do with that, but at some point, you know, we'll smoke it, we'll learn it, and then at some point, we'll use it in a maquette as we kind of, you know, work through, how does this work with other tobaccos? Because when you're making new blends, what happens is you start with the material, and then you learn how the material works together. So, a lot of times, when I'm working on something, for example, like Cro-Magna Pennsylvania, you don't need 50 different iterations, I mean, you know what you want, so you start with kind of, these are the materials I'm going to have to use, these are materials I can't use, and then you say, okay, what is it missing, so you maybe go through three, four iterations, and a lot of times, you had it in the first two or three, but then what happens is, you have to actually make it. You make it for a couple reasons.

You make it to see, okay, well, how does it work in different sizes? Do we have to change the construction method? Or do we have to, how do we do the ratios in the different sizes? Or you say you also want to calculate your consumption.

Because part of pricing out what it's going to cost, which is part of pricing out what you're going to charge for it, is understanding, okay, if I make 1,000 of these, How much of this filler exactly did I use? How much of this binder did I use, consume? Uh, so then, um, that's a big part of it, so in that part of the blending process you make, you know, to actually taste a blend you make a couple of molds, maybe 20, but to actually, then you'll make 50 or 60 to kind of, to get the consumption piece of it down, uh, roughly, and then, and to take and, you know, smoke, kind of, you know. So you can kind of, every four or five weeks, you know, you've done this a couple times.

Right. But then at some point you make, you know, 800, 1000, 1500, just to kind of validate all those assumptions, but also to see what it's like when it ages. " Right. It doesn't work that way?

Right. So when you get to that point of where you're making like 1000 of them, that's where we kind of get into the maquette territory. Because we know we like the blend, we know we like the sizes, we think we know what it's going to taste like in six months, you know, four months, or whatever. So then, sometimes, like Mastron is a good example, I wanted to make that blend, and I thought maybe it would be a private label, maybe it would be like an LE for somebody, but I liked it so much that it became a core line.

But when we went from the maquette version of Mastranza to the coralline, the blend is exactly the same, but we changed the size, we changed the wrappers a little bit darker, it's not as clean as the maquette was. But in the maquette, we were using a very specific kind of tobacco that we had accumulated, and we had accumulated it over four or five, like for example, The binder on the Maquette Mastranza was binder from Adaparaca wrapper that had already been de-veined, and it already kind of, once you de-vein it, it starts to kind of, you know, die, I guess, because there's no, the vein system is still how the humidity gets into the leaf, right? And it's kind of still breathing and living in a way. And then once you devein it to make wrapper and binder, and then you go, oh, this wrapper is actually binder quality, but it's already deveined, and then you dry it and put it into a bale, after two or three years, they say that tobacco is dead, but interestingly, because that's what we used on the maquette, it has a completely different flavor profile, obviously.

It's more inert than just using Adaparaca Binder. So the early Coraline Mastranza we did, we did just with Adaparaca Binder, and it didn't taste the same. So we actually had to start buying a binder, deveining it, letting it dry out for six months to a year. Wow, so it would be the same.

To get it closer to the maquette. But it's that process of, Maquette is about that process of discovering all these little things, like how do you put the brake back into the bunch? You know, does the tips go forward or backwards? You know, if you, when you go to a different size, you know, where, you know, how do you change the, you know...

The blend components? Yeah, the ratio of the components. So, Maquette has been something we've been working on. I've really enjoyed it.

We have a new one coming out called the Steel Porcupine, which is interesting. We've been working on a 15th anniversary for Jerry at Joseph's Cigar, which has been a challenge because Joseph, Michael Joseph doesn't really like, he likes Baca, and he doesn't really like strong cigars, which is mostly what we make. And making, you know, mild to, you know, really mild cigars is hard to do in Nicaragua. Mainly you accomplish it by not using much Nicaraguan filler.

So the one, the best milder cigar we ever made was the Schuster Anniversary Cigar, the Casa Torres. So we kind of started with that, but kind of went kind of the Baca direction with Cameroon and Homistron, and I was still never happy with it. we did like six or seven different versions of it starting from their their thing from the tobacco school to saying you know you know let me and then finally i was smoking in and i called alex and i said hey i want you to make some samples do this do this do this and alex calls he goes wow it's crazy good i'm like i've been doing this a while he goes it's crazy how you do that i'm like no No, it's not. It's not magic.

It's, there's no magic involved. They're just thousands and thousands and thousands of, you know, they say, they say, Malcolm Gladwell, if you spend 10,000 hours doing something to become an expert, I mean, I probably have 80,000 hours smoking cigars or 100,000 hours. I mean, that's kind of funny, too, because I actually had an interesting conversation with somebody with that exact thing in mind. And, you know, the term master blender pops up, right?

Which is, you know, haha, we all kind of laugh about it or whatever. But someone said, you know, Skip's not a master blender. I'm not. And I said, that's exactly what you would say.

Yeah. But the reality is that, and I broke it down, I go, how did the Beatles become the Beatles? They spent so much time doing something, they're that good at it, you know? So, you understand tobacco at a higher level than, I would say, the vast majority, even people that are in Esteli to some degree, right?

You know, I think a lot of the people that I think of as masters, people like Arsenio Ramos, for example, or Henke Kellner, or Benjamin Endes. These guys are masters because, for the most part, they started from kind of the farm, the agronomy, the how the different variety, I mean, Arsenio and Benji were around as they hybridized seeds, you know, all the things we use now, like Corojo 96, or Habano 2000, or Arsenio and guys like Benji were around when those things were being developed. P. Carrillo, who he's not, I mean he's an expert with tobacco to be sure, but I don't think he would, you know, I don't know Ernie as a farmer per se, or an agronomy.

You know, like Julio Arroa is an agronomist, but you know, Julio Arroa makes good cigars, but everything he ever made is very, very mild and well balanced, right? Because for years and years, most people tried to make Cuban cigars, right? And then also, a lot of guys who are on that end of the business, they're thinking about how can I make the best cigar to get the best tobacco for yield, for economics, to generate, you know, You know, a prophet, you know, Carrillo, I would say Pepin, you know, I wouldn't have a hard time saying Pepin's getting close if he's not already kind of a master at, he's a master at the craft of making cigars and building a company. AJ is probably in there, but I wouldn't call AJ a master, you know, but, you know, AJ, when, when you go from, I mean, guys like AJ, Me and Pepin, and Hincky, I would say, these guys, when you can manage everything from seeds, to growing, to the barns, which is its own kind of crazy alchemy, to fermentation, to blending, to generating products, to selling and distributing them, you can do it like the Padrones, where they do four or five kinds of tobacco, and it's very different.

They're very, very simple, and they do it for years and years, and they just, they just become, you know, masters of doing their thing, I would say Orlando was like that, Orlando Padrón, or you could take some guy like, you know, I had an experience, a lot of experience working with Ernie on King Guajanario, so it changed a lot of how I perceived him. In a lot of ways, it really, I got a much better appreciation for what he does, but in a lot of ways, it's like, it's so different than the way I think about making cigars, that it kind of humanized him, he wasn't a superhero in my eyes so much, as a, you know... As just a cigar guy. He's a master, no doubt, but we think about making cigars completely different, which is why King Guajanara was a crazy project.

I mean, at the end of it, basically, you know, everyone agreed, you know, keep your factory because you're never going to be able to work with someone else to make your cigars. It's not going to be the way that you want it done. Yeah, and that doesn't mean it's right or wrong or indifferent. It's just your kitchen, it's you're the chef, it's your kitchen.

Right. Right? Yeah, so to kind of close that out, I don't know enough, I mean, I can go into a room and I know enough parlor tricks and enough experience to say, you know, this guy's telling me this is Esteli, but I know it's Condega. Right.

Or this guy's telling me this is Connecticut River Valley, Broadleaf, I obviously know that it's Pennsylvania. I know those kinds of things, the way you know the difference between a cashew and a peanut, you know, just because I've been around it enough, but, you know, sometimes, I mean, I even doubt myself, someone will hand me a cigar, and I'll be like, in my head, I go, like today, or last night, someone gave me a cigar, and I'm like, this is Sumatra, and then, then I'm like, is it Habano? And they're like, no, it's Sumatra, and I'm like, why don't I just trust myself, you know? Well, yeah, instinctively, the first response is probably the right response, right?

Yeah. But, I mean, Sumatra and Habano, they're a lot of similarities. And they're hybridized. Right.

So, depending on which kind of, does it look more like the mother or the father, you know? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm better than the average guy, I would guess, in terms of experience. I would say so.

Yeah. I'm not a master. I would say that you're in the conversation, dude. I mean, you know, you're the only guy I trust, so there's that.

Well, that's a different thing. Yeah. I think that's less about, again, you know, like I say all the time, making cigars is not, there's no magic involved, right? There's no secret tobacco, there's no, there is some of that in terms of just, I guess there's master tasters, Or master, you know, people at hybridizing, whatever, right?

But if you give me finished material, or material that's close to being finished, I can generally, I can generally tell what I need to do with it to make it the way I want it. And definitely, when tobaccos are kind of working together, I know what I like. And, you know, I never approach it from the perspective of how do I make the thing that this person will like? Like, how do I make a cigar that Cigar Aficionado will love?

Or how do I make a cigar that Michael Joseph will love for his anniversary? " Right? Because I can point you to somebody who'll do exactly what you want, as long as you pay them what you want to pay them. And a lot of times it doesn't even have to do with the money for me.

I mean, the money will work out, but I know what I like. And we, you know, Mike says it, I say it all the time, is we don't make cigars for everybody. You know, we make cigars that we like. I make cigars that I like.

Hopefully Mike likes them too, because we make what I want to make. You guys have two totally different palettes. Yeah, and when Mike tells me, "Hey, I want to make this," I'm like, you know, whatever. " It's much better at that point.

Yeah. No, and it's not about ego or anything. It's just about I have to get into a frame where I'm in that flow with it. Right.

A lot of the projects you've worked on recently with Alex, I'm like, man, I don't know. I'm not a big fan of these. When the Connecticut came out, I called you. Well, first of all, when it was blended, I said, man, I don't know.

But maybe it'll kind of get better. And then at the time we were going to pull them out, because we usually do Connecticut for about 12 weeks. And I had some pulled out, and I started smoking them and smoking them. And I called you and I said, "Dude, trust me when I tell you we should take this whole entire production, we should put it in unbanded bundles and just sell it as…" Just purge them.

" I'm like, "Yeah, of course they're made right. " I just, it didn't, you know, it's like a flat cake, you know. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie, the wine movie, where the guy goes crazy because his wine's all cloudy, and then he just like gets rid of it all, I think it's called like Bottle Shock or something like that, and then it turned out that the wine was so perfect that like in two days it cleared up, and then he won all these big awards, I'm not saying that happened with this. That's pretty much, that's pretty much post-line to Connecticut.

But what happened, whatever happened, when the humidity changed on that cigar, I had them like out on the desk in the air conditioning for, you know, a couple of weeks, and I went back to and I said, actually, it's, you know, it's, it's actually pretty good. Yeah. That was pretty funny, man. Yeah, I would have never released that blend.

Yeah, because I totally trust your judgment, right? Yeah. So when you call me and you're like, these are, I'm like, fuck, okay. So, you know, I said, send some, send me some.

I light it up, I smoke it. Here, dude. I only use a big. I have a contract.

Hold on. Did I drop my... Oh, sorry. Thanks.

Yeah. My Esteli DuPont. But yeah, I would have never released that cigar because I just didn't feel it from the beginning. Yeah, so I light it up, and I say, and you're like, see, you see what I'm talking about?

Like, no, I have no idea. I don't see it, yeah. Like, it's amazing. It's everything I thought it would be, you know?

Yeah, and I'm interested to see how the War Bear comes out, because that's another one when I smoked it. I'm like, man, I'm not too sure about this. Yeah. The catastrophic failure.

I was like, you know, it's okay. Yep. But it turns out, I really, really like that blend. Yeah.

And actually, we're going to do Palestania Sumatra next. We are. So that's how much I like it. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable how the blending and development all kind of happens, right?

And my kind of rule of thumb is that, you know, we start off with kind of this base, right? And it's almost like when we gravitate to a point where you no longer like it, but it's okay, and I still love it, I know that it's got my kind of image on it, if that makes any sense. Yeah, 100%. It's less you and more us, right?

So... And from the very beginning, so, I don't know if people know this, but the Palastana Habano and the Broadleaf are not that much different than Cro-Magnon and Aquitaine. Right. And you guys got there on your own, it was kind of because that's the tobaccos we had.

But now that we have a lot more kinds of tobaccos in the pre-industry and we have a lot more different kind of grades and shades and textures inside of each one, it's kind of really opened up. You know, it's kind of like going from like 16 colors on the original computers to like, you know, like 256 color to 64 bit. I mean, there's a lot more options, right? So, but, you know, what is a good cigar?

I think there's objective criteria for what a good cigar is. What is good tobacco? I mean, some people, you know, it's like, what is a good steak? Is it medium rare?

Is it medium well? Is it well? I mean, everybody has a personal preference. It's medium rare below.

Right. But, you know, for me, it's like, fermentation is like that. Right. You know, it's a funny thing when you have, when you ferment wrapper, for example.

Let's say we buy 5,000 pounds of wrapper. We get two or three years worth of a kind of wrapper, you can't take the whole Pallone to 100%. You have to take it to where you get 30% of the Pallone at 95%, and then you kind of kill the Pallone, put it into packs or boxes, and then you put it back into a smaller Pallone when you need the next years. Because if you take it all the way up to 100%, and then you put it into boxes for a year and a half or two years, it's not the same as what you want.

So it's kind of like, you know, you sous vide it up to, you know, so you can cook what you need as you need it, but it's kind of almost there. It's like prepped. Yeah. So there's a lot of things like that you learn, but, you know, Alex is, I always say Alex's superpower, He hates it when I say this, but it's like, dude, it's like your superpower is turning $35, $40 wrapper into $10 binder.

I'm looking at these numbers like, what the fuck are you doing? You're killing me here. But we're, you know, like one of the things we do is now is we sort filler, which nobody does. So, you know, you go buy filler, it's in the packs, it's supposedly all sorted, it's supposedly all graded by texture, size, everything.

We open every one of those hundred packs and then our team, our Dispega team comes up with, you know, 16 different grades and varieties out of that hundred pounds. No kidding. It's crazy. But, for example, we'll open up a pack of Jalapa Seco, which shouldn't be, you know, shouldn't be that much work to do, right?

So you open it and you go, okay, this Halapa Secco is great for base leaf. This is not good for base. This Halapa Secco has more texture, so we need to use it for Whiskey Rebellion, whereas this one has a little less texture, we need to use it for EC or whatever, right? So, even within, even if you have a, you know, a medium, Jalapa, Viso, from, you know, Corojo, from Aganorsa, that has already been graded and fermented and everything, even within that 100 pounds, this goes to that blend, this goes to that blend, this is going to have to get sold, or traded, and this is, you know, going to have to be sold or traded at a most I think a much lower dollar amount, because it's just not, should never even been in that pack, and you know, I think we have 70 people, obviously, we only have 24 of them making cigars, so that's like one person, you know, you know, two people for every one production head, that's not good ratio of numbers for making money, no, so, I mean, our factory is pretty much non-profit, I think, you know, we do, we do about one, one point, two people for making cigars, that's not good ratio of numbers for making money, no, so, I mean, our, our factory is pretty much non-profit, I think, you know, we do, we do about one, one point, two, We try to do it where at the end of the year, if we make $40,000 or $50,000, then we're good.

Right. 2 million cigars, they'd just shut it down. Right. But we never lost money.

I don't lose money. That's good. But all of that is to say, it's not about the magic of making cigars. It's about all the little decisions you have to make to produce the thing that you know is the right way of doing it, and just be willing to say, you know what, you know, I hate to do it, but that $140,000 we have in that pologne, let's see if we can trade it to X company for $80,000 worth of filler, because I'm not using it, and there's not a lot of people to do that.

A lot of people say, well, can we cook it? Can we use it for bundled cigars? They have a lot more options than we have, obviously. But those are the decisions that differentiate a factor that makes good cigars or hit-and-miss cigars and a factor that's the half-full factor of the year, four out of five years.

Right. Right. So you kind of touched on Baca. Originally, when you made Cameroon, you weren't working with Mirafell, right?

No, we actually, sorry, it's only one person, that's only Fiorella. Gotta take it. Yeah. I would, it's a video call too.

She's probably asking me to approve extra time on her tablet. More iPad time? Yeah. That's the only time, either that or when you, yep, screen time request.

That or when I turn the, that or when I turn the, the Wi-Fi off? Yeah. If I change the Netflix password, I get calls from all my children. So, let me approve her some screen time here.

It's funny, like, I knew exactly what it was. There she is. So, to answer the question about, so what we, the only real Cameroon is from Mirafel. The original Baca was Mirafil Cameroon that we were buying from Gilberto Oliva, and then when Gilberto sold to Jay Cortez, to Fred, there was still some of that Gilberto Oliva Cameroon, like Carlos Sanchez had a bunch, and then once we kind of went through that, we stopped making Baca.

And then the Mirafell family, so before COVID, long story short, before COVID, we both kind of came with this idea of making a cigar called Mastranza, completely independently, but both inspired by the same episode of Chef's Table, ironically. " So the plan was just to sell them the marks. They, I don't know why, I don't know why people in the cigar business don't actually spend the couple thousand dollars to trademark stuff before they, I think, because maybe it gives people a signal of things that they're going to do, but they actually release stuff before they trademark it, which makes no sense to me. But, but they had what you call the common law mark, you know, is in use in the market.

So, at the end of the day, we just kind of agreed, he had to, And he asked me for years to make a project with him, and I just didn't really feel like it fit. And then, so we just kind of had a lot of discussions, and then one day it was like, listen, you sell it in Europe, we sell it in the United States. By the way, we could use some tobacco. We've been using your, he goes, yeah, as long as you put a seal on the box that says it's mirror-filled tobacco.

I'm like, no problem. But then the artwork that they gave us, I didn't like, so we ended up not using it. So we're still working on trying to get one that is, you know, what we want. That's Roma Craft-esque?

Yeah. But because the seal has the actual continent of Africa, which is also in the Baka logo. Right. And so I felt like it conflicted, but we worked that out, they sold us direct, and maybe at some point we'll make a Mirafell project.

I think they generally don't like to tell people what factories make those projects, so you may not ever know we made it, but... - But I know? - Yeah. - I probably know.

Okay, well... - There will be signs. Yeah. I come down to the factory and, you know, somebody from Mirafel's hanging out.

Something like that. What about Matafina? What's going on with that? Because people are always, a lot of people are always asking about Wanderlust.

And yes, it's European market only. However, from what I've heard in like our conversations, you're, you haven't been able to source that tobacco. Well, it's the same problem we have with Adaparaca. We're very specific about the kind of tobacco we want, and until I can get Alex on an airplane to go down to Brazil, the problem is we used to buy really good Adaparaca for $18 a pound, and then we worked it for a long time, like five, six years, and then the problem now is it's $35 a pound, or $40 a pound, it's not happening.

And the staff is good. Right. We depended a lot on Philip Schuster to help us source the Modifina. Philip retired, and now his son, Martin, is the head of the Schuster, August Schuster.

So, um... And he's really cool. Yeah. I like him.

The whole family. I love the whole family. But, um, I mean, what it boils down to is, is when we find the tobacco, and it's the tobacco, And it's the kind of quality and everything that I want, we'll make it again until then we can't make it. Okay.

Also, one of the components we use in it is going to also be harder to find than it used to be, so. Why is that? Because the guy we were buying it from doesn't have it anymore, so. Oh, makes sense.

Yeah. Okay. So, Maquette's coming out, you have Kraft coming out. So, what else are you kind of envisioning at the end of 2025 and kind of into 2026?

Right now, the hardest thing for us to make is Aquatane, because getting good high-priming Habano has been tough. We just bought some more. We bought about a half year's worth, eight or nine months ago, I know from Gus Cura, he just hasn't had any that meets kind of the requirements we have we don't use a lot but a lot of times when they sell tobacco they just sell it all you know you can't just pick you know cherry pick what you want but we found some more in the Dominican with Dun & Foster this last month so you know we'll start production on that again. I think in the next year it's going to be Palestania Sumatra, it's going to be this Joseph's project, the Jeff's project with the 15th year.

That's pretty much it, I think. Yeah. I'm kind of surprised at how popular Mastranz has been, so once we catch up on that, I think we'll maybe make an LE in that, or maybe make something, you know, we'll see. Okay.

Is there any type of rapper right now that you're really interested in working with? I would really like to work with Authentic Corojo, but Christian Aroa doesn't want to sell it to me, so I think I could do some crazy good cigars with that. There's a lot of Corojo out there, but, you know, it's just not the same. Why won't he sell it to you?

I mean, you know, I guess that's his thing. For a man who has so many words. I mean, Julio or Justo would sell it, I'm sure, they would love to sell it, but they have their own cigars, so sell it to me for X dollars a pound or make cigars and make three times the money, so I don't blame them, but just like Placencia has great homistron, but he won't sell it to me. What about the Mountain Tobacco?

The, yeah, that's, yeah, that's, I haven't, I smoked a sample of that at the trade show, but. Yeah. I mean, pretty much everything in Esteli is high altitude. Right.

But that's even, that's like coffee region high altitude. Everyone, I mean, everything they've been making, Blasensia, it seems to me like they're kind of hitting on all cylinders. Yeah. It's a little expensive for me, personally.

Right. But. Okay. All right, well, does anybody have any questions for Steve?

Do we have something more interesting to talk about? I mean, my philosophy on business, raising children, relationships, anything. You saw right there how I handled that. Yeah, that was amazing.

You're so dialed in. Yeah. Incredible. You guys have any questions or anything?

Anybody want to ask them, Skip, any questions? Julian, what you got? Something. You got to have something.

No? It's the meaning of life? Nothing. Okay.

All right, well, I guess we'll just wrap it up from here, man. Well, thanks again for coming on, dude, and thanks for coming down here. I really appreciate you. I appreciate everything you do for us, man.

Of course. You're one of the greatest friends I have. That makes me feel bad for you a little bit. I scare people off.

No, I mean, you know, here's the thing. It kind of comes from, look, you cover a lot of this on the Patreon, so I don't need to get into all the industry gossip, but I'm kind of a guarded person in general in terms of trusting people. To me, it's pretty simple. It's just do what you say you're going to do.

Treat other people the way you want to be treated. And that doesn't mean everybody likes you. Because I am authentic, there's people who just don't like me. And that's okay.

But what they can't say is that I've lied to them. They can't say I cheated them, that I owed them money and didn't pay it, that I tried to deceive them somehow, because I'm just not that person. So for me, I mean, I think, you know, we're different people. We think about things very differently.

But if I say I'm going to do something, I do it. If you say you're going to do something, you do it. If you call me and say, hey, could you help me? It's like, of course.

Well, what is it you need? You know, and I'm the same way. You know, I think kind of our relationship is more built on that than anything. A hundred percent.

Right. Absolutely. Palmer, anything else to add? Yeah, what's your editorial?

Yeah, Palmer. BDP. Well, I don't have anything that'll make you cry, but what non-industry podcast do you listen to? Ooh.

I've been listening a lot more to Scott Galloway. He has a podcast called Raging Moderates that I like, because I am, contrary to popular belief, very moderate. I'm not a liberal, really. I'm lowercase liberal.

Right. Right. I mean, I have really good friends. Oh, another, I might be working on a project with a gun manufacturer, which is really cool.

They're friends with buyers. But they are like, we can't say the name far. Right. I don't know.

Are they located in Texas? Yeah, but we sit down and we start talking about, um, we start talking about political policy things and we're, we're like almost a hundred percent. Like, well, that makes sense. Well, of course that makes sense.

You know? And it's like, well, this is how I feel about immigrants. It's like, well, living in Nicaragua, Nicaragua, let me give you another perspective, and you're like, yeah, I completely understand that, but what about MS? Yeah, of course nobody likes MS-13 or whatever.

Right. So, yeah, but I'm, you know, liberal in the sense of keep your dirty government paws off of my business. Right. But then kind of, you know, capital L liberal in the sense of, you know, you know how I grew up.

Right. I got where I am because of America. Right. When living in Nicaragua, when nothing works, you know, just because the government is not, has no efficacy, then you start realizing, I don't care how big the government is or isn't, it just needs to work, and it should be efficient.

So, I listen to Scott Galloway, the Raging Moderates, he also has another podcast with Kara Sedgwick, I think called Pivot or something that I listen to. That I listen to... I listen to the NPR, Hourly News... I listen to a lot of podcasts.

Mike Skip doesn't think I smoke on the show. We're not allowed to show him smoking on the show. I know, it's about the monetization. We do a good job of doing that.

I listen to Joe Rogan depending on who the guest is. If it's somebody that I'm interested in the guest. So, I'll listen to it. That's it.

There you go. Anything else, Palmer? Is TV hard to get in Nicaragua? Is that why you do a lot of podcasts?

Or is that just your preferred form of entertainment? No. Actually, I use a VPN. So, a NordVPN.

So, I stream. I have, like, direct TV stream. I have all the streaming services. So, I can.

But I'm awake 20 hours a day. Right. So, I kind of always have something in the background. Yeah.

There you go. All right. Well, thanks. We're going to finish on that strong.

Yeah. Nobody else has a question? Go ahead, Erik. What you got?

Oh, this? The Cappuccino Assassinino. This is the next shirt that we got coming out on CH Pod. I figured I'd wear it on this one, but I'm going to wear it on the, and talk about it more on the actual show.

But yes, you have heard of Italian brain rot? Yeah, I tried to get Fiorella to demonstrate her knowledge, and she basically says, "I don't dance. F you. " Yeah, you don't call her on cue.

She does it by herself, whenever she wants, not when you ask her to do it, right? Yeah, she's like my clone in a lot of ways. I can see that. Yeah.

For sure. com, so Julian's very excited. Do you have copyright infringement problems with that? No.

No? Not yet. Did you ever sell the BDPT shirts or you're going to have to give those away? No, we sold them.

You sold all of them? Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

Are you interested, sir? No. No. Hurtful.

Just a little hurtful, Skip. Yeah. I wear your shirts all the time. I have something like 200 t-shirts.

Yeah. I think I keep like 30 or 40 in Austin and like, you know, 60 or 70 and, you know, whatever. However, I have way too many t-shirts. I have the 2X Skinny Skip t-shirts and the 3X.

It really just depends on what, you know, what month we're working in. What's going on? Yeah. If it's bulking season or cutting season?

Yeah. Got it. Very cool. All right.

Well, again, thanks so much for coming on, brother. We appreciate you, man. You're welcome. Skip, everybody.

Show Notes

A Special Interview With Skip Martin