Year in Review 2023

It has been a great year for my review site, so many thanks to all my readers worldwide. Thankfully this year I didn’t have to sit outdoors during the cold winter months to do my reviews thanks to the local cigar club finding a location for the lounge. In the beginning it was very barebone with no ventilation but its been developing through the year and now its my second home. Feels great to sit indoors in the warmth enjoying cigars as it should be, you really get more flavours out of a cigar if you sit indoors without any environmental distractions.

**Sweet Leaf Cigar Lounge, Gothenburg, Sweden**

This year I’ve done 138 reviews for the blog and 60 reviews for Cigar Journal, crazy that I have been able to put out so much, even though I’ve had a busy schedule with work, but my passion for cigars have a high priority in my life.

In August I probably got the coolest cigar industry memorabilia sent to me by J.C. Newman, a LEGO set of their El Reloj Tampa Cigar Factory, a quick build but I absolutely adore it and hope more manufactures jump on the same train because I want to collect them ALL!

In September I went back to InterTabac in Dortmund, Germany, the worlds biggest tobacco fair. Once again as a guest of HENK, but I was mainly there to represent the Swedish cigar market to help out the different importers of brands to find new and interesting brands to bring in. I’m holding my fingers crossed for upcoming collaborations I introduced during the fair and had meeting with.

Then of course to meet friends of the industry and to attend Cigar Journals Cigar Trophy Awards, but this year I was relegated to stand in the hallway as I guess more brands needed the seating in the auditorium due to last year the room was over crowded with people standing.

Something that was a nice surprise to encounter at this years fair was the appreciation I got for the blog and my writing about cigars, Fouad owner of Hiram & Solomon even thanked me for being brutally honest and actually posting if a cigar wasn’t good, this is information the brands want to know so they can ratify and improve their cigars. Yes it’s actually good not to just put out good reviews once in a while, something I know many reviewers don’t like to do.

Then I made an frenemy of a Legend in the cigar industry this year over an disagreement of the overuse of “Cuba” or “Cubano” as description words for brands even if they have no connection to Cuba in this day, in my opinion it’s false advertising and only confuses the consumers more. This is more prominent on the US market as they have an embargo against Cuba (which in itself is odd that they do it) and these products can’t be sold worldwide as the rest of the world agrees that if the country of origin isn’t Cuba then you can’t have it in your products name. Maybe we need a D.O.C (Controlled Designation of Origin) certification for the cigar industry? Like there is for wine and food items with protected origins, so we can authenticate what’s real and not. And I know many manufactures put it on the paper strip on the boxes stating the origin but nothing is on the singles of cigars, as I think the vast majority of consumers buy the cigars by the singles rather than boxes.

I’m a pretty outspoken individual and I want the truth to be out there for the consumers to know and I much rather break bridges than back down from my believes.

ACHIVEMENTS OF THE YEAR

In January HALFWHEEL publicised their highly anticipated “THE CONSENSUS 2022 LISTS” and I got mentioned as one of the reviewers/publications they had used to compile their list. [2023-01-23]

Smokers Planet published an article “Kleinlagel remains on the road to success and feels confirmed” ranking the German cigar distributors Kleinlagel’s portfolio of cigars that had been mentioned in reviewers and publications top 25 lists of 2022. I got mentioned a few times as I seemed to have ranked a few of their cigars last year. (Site is in german, but can easily be translated with google translate). [2023-01-23]

On December 13th the blog reached 150.000 all time views and 40.000 views for the year, all big achievements for the year.

In December I also got offered to write a cigar book, so guess I’m a future author, I’ll keep you updated next year for how it goes.

On December 30th marked my 10 year anniversary of enjoying cigars and what a ride it has been, here’s to many more years to come. Also my 28th birthday 😀

Now to the stats of the blog!

During 2023 we had an amazing array of people coming in to read the blog, an astonishing 163 different nationalities, viewing the site 42,797 times from 20,804 individuals. A growth of 37% in amount of views and 47% in visitors, which is amazing! Additionally 7.23% in the amount of different nationalities. Many thanks to all new readers. In total I made 140 posts, out of these 138 were reviews which was a increase of 163% of posts during the year.

All time stats (July 2017-Dec 2023) for the page is 876 post (845 being reviews), 153 277 views from 65 731 people in 179 nations.

Out of 138 reviewed cigars there was a total of 67 different brands represented, here are the top 10 most frekvent ones.