PDR Finds Forgotten Inventory of Aged Cigars

Oct 22, 2020 | By Thomas Pappalardo

After doing a little fall cleaning in the aging room, PDR Cigars owner Abe Flores says he found a forgotten inventory of smokes he made in 2014 for a European company. The shipment never left the factory. Now, six years later, Flores decided to rebrand the cigars PDR Small Batch Exclusive, and they’re going out to retailers this week.

“It was a production we made for a European customer and we forgot we had them until now. So, we decided to do something special with them for the U.S.,” Flores told Cigar Aficionado.

The cigars were originally intended to age for only five or six months but the European company went out of business and the cigar order was never fulfilled. When Flores began reorganizing his aging room, he recently uncovered multiple forgotten blends, totaling about 180,000 cigars.

Flores also told Cigar Aficionado that the other recently found blends will be released in the future as small, limited runs.

Limited to a production of only 20,000 sticks, PDR Small Batch Exclusive comes in two varieties, natural and maduro, and is only available in packs of five (4,000 packs total).

The natural version consists of a Cuban-seed Brazilian wrapper, Dominican Criollo ’98 binder and a mix of Dominican and Nicaraguan filler tobaccos. The maduro version is the same internal blend with a dark, Mexican San Andrés wrapper.

Both versions, which are hand-made, long-filler cigars, come in two sizes. The natural is available as a Toro (6 inches by 52 ring gauge) and Robusto (5 by 52). The maduro comes in a Toro and Short Gordo (5 1/8 by 60). The Robusto five-pack has a suggested retail price for $24 while the Toro and Short Gordo are priced at $26 per pack.

PDR Small Batch Exclusive was made at the PDR Cigars factory in the Dominican Republic.