La Galera comes with new lines. The two new lines will debut at the PCA Convention & Trade show that will start tomorrow. One line, the La Galera Imperial Jade, will be a regular production release. The other, La Galera 85th Anniversary is a limited edition.

La Galera Imperial Jade

For the first time in existence, Jose “Jochy” Blanco will be offering a cigar with a Cameroon wrapper in the La Galera brand. The Imperial Jade is the sixth offering under the La Galera umbrella. It joins the La Galera Connecticut, Habano, Maduro, 1936, and Anemoi series. 

Making the Imperial Jade wasn’t a walk in the park for Blanco at his Tabacalera Palma despite all the experience. “The lack of tobacco know-how in Cameroon means extra work for us at the factory. When the tobacco is received it must go through additional processes, making sure the tobacco is up to the standard that we require it to be before we even think of putting it in one of our cigars,” Blanco says in a press release.

Underneath the Cameroon wrapper hides a Criollo binder from the Jacagua farm in the Dominican Republic. That farm is part of Tabacalera La Palma. The filler comes partially from the same farm, and from the La Canela farm, which is also part of Tabacalera La Palma. There will be five sizes available from September onwards. A 5½x44 Corona, 5½x50 Robusto, 6×52 Toro, 6×52 Piramide, and a 7×47 Churchill.

La Galera 85th Anniversary

Tabacalera Palma, the cigar factory of the Blanco family, was officially founded in 1936. That means that the factory is 85 years old, and still a family-owned business. Jose “Jochy” Blanco is now running the family operation. And he uses the milestone for a special project, a limited edition cigar in collaboration with his father, Jose Manuel Blanco. Jochy is responsible for one blend, his father for the other.

“When we sat down to think of ways to accurately convey what this occasion meant to us, we both decided to consult our fathers,” says Jochy Blanco in a press release. “My father revisited dozens of scribbles and stand-alone paragraphs in my grandfather’s notebooks and reexamined the tobacco growing and processing wisdom of two generations, along with the cigar manufacturing wisdom of one generation. I borrowed my father’s wisdom after bribing him with some cheap whiskey,” he adds.

The only thing that sets both blends apart is the wrapper. The Dominican Corojo binder and Dominican Piloto Cubana and Criollo 98 filler are the same in both blends. Jochy opts for a Connecticut Shade wrapper, where his father went for Connecticut Broadleaf. Both cigars are 6×52 toro vitolas and come in boxes of 20 cigars. 10 of each blend per box. There are a total of 2021 boxes available. The lid of the box doubles as an ashtray.

“My father’s blend was inspired by my grandfather, Don Nanán, who loved Connecticut wrapper almost as much as his nine children,” Blanco says. “He combined decades of unused blending techniques with Dominican seed tobaccos and produced a traditional Dominican cigar made with Corojo binder, with Piloto Dominicano and Criollo 98 filler from our Jacagua and Gurabo farms, giving it the typical raisin and nutmeg notes of Dominican tobaccos.”

Jochy Blanco says that his blend is a more leathery smoke. His inspiration comes from his father’s desire to experiment with different tobacco blends.