Anybody else grow Havana leaf?

[Oblofusc]

Starting March this year I decided to take a shot at growing some leaf to see if I could end up with something even resembling premium cigar tobacco. Bought seeds from Virtual Seeds, a couple Havana varieties as well as wrapper & binder varieties. Long story short--it's not terribly difficult to grow, the plants get huge, & it's not hard to hang/dry the leaves to where they go from green to yellow to a nice brown, but after that's when the real work begins. It needs to be fermented (not actually a true fermentation process, it's more of an enzyme thing, but everyone calls it "fermenting") about a month (carefully monitored as to humidity & heat levels up to 120F), THEN the leaves are "aged" for at least a year, two's probably better, and maybe ferment them again. As I sit here today I have several giant ziploc bags full of what looks like wonderful leaf, but I know that it'll be summer 2010or somewhere in 2011 before I MIGHT end up with some respectable leaf.

Yes of course I've already tried smoking it--I already have several wood molds I bought off e-bay, have made my own chavetas & am already down with the rolling techniques from watching hours of Youtube videos & watching the torcedores at Cuban Crafters in Miami when I visited--and rolled two so far and smoked them. I guess it was exciting that they sure 'nuff tasted like real cigars, but the connoisseur in me was NOT impressed. A little harsh, a little bitter, and lacking in any complexity of flavor. Basically not much better than a convenience store cheapo cigar. OK maybe not that bad. But the point being, the leaf clearly wasn't ready, and it drove the point home that if the leaf didn't need to be aged for 1-3 years to qualify for use in a premium cigar, then premium cigar producers wouldn't bother.

I'm hoping someone else has gone down this road a couple of years ago and now has some good aged leaf? If so, let's hear it!

Ted in Tallahassee

 

[mcroom]

Don't forget that the soil, altitude and weather will also play a vital role in the end product.

 

[Hardcore]

Why not stop by the introductions & tell us about yourself.

 

[Oblofusc]

Good point about the soil--being a "microbrewery" I have full control the soil and watering. I grew it all in big nursery pots sitting on the ground and could move them also and thus had some control over different sun exposure. I used several different soil types, most of it varieties of high dollar garden soil (Miracle-Gro and similar). Fertilizer too. Altitude, well can't control that! Temperature not so much either. But they all grew fantastically and I can't help but think I ended up with a good basic product in the initially dried leaves; as far as I have determined the real art is in the fermenting/aging.

As for intros, nothin' of interest to say, I'm just an average Joe who likes a good cigar, and who this year decided it would be kinda cool to make some myself, or at least have a ball trying.

 

[Fierce Krypton]

Dude, that is awesome! You should keep doing it every year and I bet you will get good at it!

 

[andy]

Dude, that is awesome! You should keep doing it every year and I bet you will get good at it!

Seriously, that's pretty freaking cool. You could end up being the next big thing. Keep it up!

 

[ctaylor]

I am in the middle of my curing process now. I bought a pack of havana seeds and ended up with 8 plants. Which all grew to over 8 1/2 feet! I spent around $5 on the seeds and i will end up with (in my estamation) around 4 lbs. of cured tobacco leaf. It isn't all that hard to grow and harvest, as long as you have some time and patience to dedicate. I'm excited to see the final product should be done in the beggining of Dec.

 

[debo0775]

I thought about starting some seeds this past spring, but I never got to it. I feel like they'd grow damn well in the soil at home, but we're also surrounded by corn fields, so the pesticides scare me a bit. I have a bit more to read up on before I'm comfortable growing my own.

 

[ctaylor]

Ted... There is a guy who lives in Oxford PA who grows and rolls his own. He has a website where he gives detailed instructions, sells leaf (cured), and seeds. When you buy seeds or leaf he sends instructions on everything. I figured I would buy some of his leaves this year to compare and to have another leaf for rolling. Here's his site tobaccotalk.itgo.com hope it helps.

 

[Oblofusc]

I've seen that site as well as scoured everything I could find on the web and still am not exactly sure how long and at what temperature to "cook" the humidified brown hands for the initial fermentation period, and exactly what to do with it after that. I have only a general idea--cook at 85F to a max of 120F for about 30 days, with the 120F being only a few days' worth. Then, pack it up and store in burlap sacks in warm humid barns for at least a year, maybe two, maybe three, maybe doing one or two more fermenting "cooks" somewhere in between. To end up with really good, primo leaf, not just "smokable" leaf.

It's been fun so far anyway. I consider the whole affair an astounding success so far in that I grew 42 plants of 5 different cigar-strain varieties to full size (not a bad survival rate all things considered, many were lost as sprouts and even some were lost up to a foot high), lost only a small percentage of browned leaf to mold (had a few spells of several continuous days of rain = 90%+ humidity = mad mold growth), and lost only a small percentage to rot in the curing chambers (too wet/too hot/too long). I know plenty of people who lost the whole shooting match at one or another of these stages. If this stuff turns out any good in a year or so, heck, I couldn't really tell you how many cigars it will make. I've got a 54 ring torpedoes, molds for 44, 48, 50 & 52 ring parejos (molds are all 7" long, cigars can be made that long or any shorter length), and one antique 4-1/2" panatela mold.

This is just one of my intensely focused random obsessive hobbies. I was all into flintknapping once, river diving for fossils and artifacts, restoring VW "Things" (still have one as a daily driver, a '73), buying machine guns (had a bunch in the past, only have Uzi and MP40 now, Mikhail T. Kalashnikov himself signed the buttstock of an AK with a Sharpie marker when I met him at a trade show in 2002), metal detecting, and a few other things. Plant-wise, before the tobacco growing obsession, it was bananas. My yard is full of various exotic banana plants, mostly gigantic varieties, as I wanted gigantic types, why bother with small ones? Year before that was mammoth sunflower plants. What's next??? To what end, I say? I guess as I'm rambling on in an Alzheimer stupor in some nursing home some day I'll have a lot of stuff to talk about as I soil myself.

But for now, let me smoke a good cigar . . .