VINTAGE CIGARS

CLEAR HAVANA CIGARS

It's not easy to determine if cigars were clear Havana other than the box stating "clear Havana" on it.
The price of the cigars will often tip us as to when expensive Cuban
tobacco was used, most clear Havanas were worth more than a nickel, hey,
there was a one dollar cigar that was sold in the 1930's and there were 50
cent cigars that sold all the way back in the 1890's.

Another good indicator as to whether clear Havana tobacco was used would be the location where

they were
made, Tampa, New York and New Jersey were known to have factories that strictly used
Cuban tobacco in their "bonded" warehouses.

Clear Havana cigar manufacturing thrived in Tampa, FL, Trenton, NJ, Philadelphia, PA and New York City..............

believe it or not!

There were thousands of factories just in a single State like NY or PA or FL and these thousands

of factories produced

10's of thousands of brands of clear Havana cigars of varying quality.

The Harvester brand slogan was "with the heart of Havana" that means that the filler was long filler

imported Havana tobacco, the binder usually came from the CT valley and the wrapper came from Sumatra, or

Central America.

Sometimes the wrapper and binder used was imported Havana tobacco.

The quality was good and the consistency was excellent, otherwise how do you explain that brands such as Robert Burns,

Muriel, Optimo and White Owl could have survived for more than 100 years

if the cigars that they produced were inferior to the imported cigars from Cuba.

So this is a journey into somewhat uncharted waters, although some of the preliminary reviews of the last three months

have been excellent and have been posted on our website; www.gotham-cigar-museum.com

Our goal was to develop a database that could serve as a historical link to the past;

Which were the greatest clear Havanas?

CIGAR STORAGE

We take cigar storage very seriously since we store cigars for many years even decades.

Our storage conditions are typically BELOW the recommended 70/70 that everyone is familiar with, the 70/70 conditions are for cigars that are ready for

consumption.
Since we are worried about long term storage we keep our cigars at 60/65.

Furthermore, the cigars that we release for sale have been "aged" in our humidors for a minimum of 6 months, many have been aging for years.