Pairing whiskey and cigars can be tricky. For starters, whiskeys have a broad range of flavor profiles, from peaty or smoky, to sweet, to spicy, which can make finding the right cigar complicated. The next challenge is that both whiskey and cigars tend to be big and bold in flavor, which can easily become overpowering. Finally, there’s not a lot of reliable information out there about what constitutes a successful pairing – simply smoking a cigar with a glass of whiskey does not, contrary to popular belief, constitute a ‘pairing’.
Over the last decade, I’ve visited cigar shops and lounges across the country and in Nicaragua. Whenever I travel to visit a distillery, I always look into the local cigar shops. On occasion I’ll find shops that are well known to the distilleries – in one such instance a local shop had a retrofitted vintage airstream that it would bring out to the distillery every weekend. At a certain point I
