Aging Room Quattro F59 by Boutique Blends Cigars | Cigar Review

Wrapper: Habano Dominicano
Binder: Habano Dominicano
Filler: Habano Dominicano
Size: 7 x 50 “Churchill – Concerto – Box Pressed”
Body: Medium/Full
Price: $10.25 MSRP

Today we look at the new Aging Room Quattro F59 by Boutique Blends Cigars.

I want to thank the kind person who sent me a couple sticks of this blend but I forgot who it is. I wrote it down and lost the paper. Charlotte bought me a big note book so I can keep track of people. So please, sir, email me and let me know so I can do the right thing here.
When I first got the two F59’s, I had no idea they were new. I almost smoked one for pleasure but my senses returned and I checked my research sources and Ooops! Thank goodness. So now I get a new cigar to review. Huzzah!

BACKGROUND:
There is a serious black hole of information about this cigar.
Aging Room Quattro F59 is a small-batch handmade from blenders Raphael Nodal and Jochi Blanco of Tabacalera La Palma.
Number of cigars produced: Unknown

DESCRIPTION:
This is a stunning looking cigar.. Long and sleek. Tight seams. Few veins. A near perfect triple cap. A soft box press. The wrapper is an oily, russet brown in color and very smooth to the touch.
It is very solid with the proper amount of give.

SIZES AND PRICING:
CONCERTO 7 x 50 $10.25 MSRP
VIBRATO 6 x 54 $10.15 MSRP
MAESTRO (TORPEDO) 6 x 52 $10.05 MSRP
ESPRESSIVO 5 x 50 $9.70 MSRP
STRETTO 4.5 x 46 $9.10 MSRP

AROMAS AND COLD DRAW NOTES:
From the shaft, I can smell a peachy, fruity sweetness, dried apricot, strong spice notes, sweet cedar, and roasted nuts.
From the clipped cap and the foot, I can smell dark cocoa, sweetness, spice, fruit, sneeze causing red pepper, and a wonderful woody aroma.
The cold draw presents flavors of creaminess, chocolate, coffee, spice, cedar, and dried fruit.

FIRST THIRD:
This is my first F59, so I am excited as Boutique Blends hits a slammer just about every time with their blends. I have the new La Bohème Encantador by Boutique Blends to review as well.
The draw is excellent.

First flavors are mild and subtle…Creaminess, spice, a lot of malts, milk chocolate, coffee, and sweetness.
This is a really packed stick. It weighs heavy hanging from my lips. The char line needs its first correction half an inch in.

I dry boxed the Aging Room Quattro F59 for 48 hours. I’ve never said and will probably never say it again…I like Wisconsin’s weather this season. It has been mild. The summer wasn’t overly hot or humid. The new fall weather is mild with highs in the 60’s and just a little bit of rain. Compared to the rest of the country, this is nirvana.

Caramel joins the fray. How could it now with all this sweetness in abundance?
OK. The malts: Cara Munich Malt, Chocolate Malt, Coffee Malt, and Flaked Rye Malt. (See Malt Chart).

After only one inch burned, the Aging Room Quattro F59 is complex with a nice balance and a great finish. Chewy. Smacking my lips and running my tongue against my teeth.
Strength is medium body. The char line is behaving.
The spiciness is moving on up the tracks to nearly first place.

In my unrelenting lack of patience, I decided to review this cigar a little on the green side. One thing I’ve learned from Boutique Blends is that most of their blends need a couple months, at least, of humidor time. I’m not even close with this review.

But then I pride myself in having a crackerjack palate. I can taste potential; or lack thereof.

This will be a great cigar with a few months humi time. I love the other Quattro blends so why should this be any different? The only possible missing link in smoking this a little before its time is the boldness and intensity of the blend. But then I saw a couple other reviews and they clearly did not make any reference of months of rest. The cigar, not them.

And then the kit and caboodle kicks in. Flavors explode. Yippy Ki Yay Mother Fucker!
This is what I’m talking about.

BTW – I checked and none of the usual suspects that give you decent pricing and promo codes carry this blend yet. Hey Joey at Summit Cigars! Get this cigar on the shelves! (Joey is a very nice man.)

The Aging Room Quattro F59 is just dripping and oozing flavors.
The caramel, the chocolate, the malts, the creaminess, and the spice are kicking arse.

The sub level elements like: roasted nuts, herbal notes, sweetness, and toastiness are giving the main flavors real support.

I saw a few video reviews but I refuse to watch them. They bore me to the nth degree. I like to read. Not stare at some guy taking big huffs from a cigar, taking it from his mouth, staring at it, lifting his head to the heavens, and then blowing out the smoke and telling us he tastes leather and earthiness. Zzzzzz….

I was going to take it easy on the photos from now on. Wearing a broken arm sling to steady my hand is a real pain in the ass. And my worst nightmare is a cigar band that is shiny white with light colored writing. My apologies.

SECOND THIRD:
Smoke time is 40 minutes.
Major Sweet Spot. Strength is medium/full. Oozing with complexity. Perfect balance. Nice long finish.

This may sound nuts…but I’ve found that using my method of lighting the outside rim of the wrapper to light the cigar instead of lighting the foot directly really helps with getting immediate flavors. The reason? I think it is due to not charring the shit out of the tobacco which gives a burned taste upfront instead of what was meant to be tasted. See photos below. It has made a major improvement to my enjoyment of cigars. It also lets you know which cigars are rolled with precision and which ones are shit rolled. I call it Tampon Rolling. (I’ve petitioned the Olympic Committee: IOC; to add this as a bona fide sport).

“Train kept a-rollin’ all night long
Train kept a-rollin’ all night long
Train kept a-rollin’ all night long
With a “heave!”, and a “ho!”
But I just couldn’t tell her so, no, no, no.”

What you say? Has he finally given in to the horrible disease in his brain. Maybe.
Construction is top rate. The char line is behaving beautifully.

The flavors are a’ poppin’. We have lots of transitions. The main flavors of spiciness, chocolate, caramel, coffee, creaminess, nuts, and malts are screaming laughter.

We haven’t told our daughter, Katie, about my life expectancy. This would freak her out something terrible. If I did sit down with her, it would be a fiasco of the most major proportions.

Ahhh..the ball and chain left for work. On comes the radio. “Power to the People” by John Lennon. Damn that was a long time ago. I should convey more stores about what it was like to live through the period of Peace, Love, and Understanding. There has been nothing like it since in those almost 50 years.

I would go to sit-ins, protests, love-ins, giving the peace sign, mass rallies, and burning your draft cards. I didn’t do that last one. I was too lady-like to go to jail.

In college, I even had instructors stop classes so we could go down to the Administration building and protest.
And thank God I was a musician playing out. If not for that, my skinny ass wouldn’t have gotten laid til I was 45.

OK. Enough. Back to the Aging Room Quattro F59. A truly delightful cigar. But at a ten spot, it better be.

I checked CI and this size is going for $9.20 instead of $10.25 by the box. Boutique Blends should have made a 10 count box available. Popping $200 for a box is out of my price range. Cbid should have them soon. Cbid has a box of the F55 going for $184 so no deal there.

Be patient my loves. In a month or so, it should be hitting your regular places of buying cigars at a discount.
Damn. Sweet Spot 2.0! What a great cigar. I will save my other stick for smoking a couple months from now and then check back. Since there are barely any reviews of this cigar, I must admit that the other reviewers are using good sense and allowing more humi rest than I did.

HALFWAY POINT:
Smoke time is one hour 5 minutes.
We have a great addition to the Boutique Blends portfolio.
But the char line needs some immediate attention.

And kudos to Nodal and Blanco for not jacking up the prices compared to the other Quattro blends.

There is also another new blend that came out of the 2015 IPCPR trade show from Boutique Blends: The Aging Room FFortisimo M19. It has Dominican Habano wrapper. And Dominican tobacco for the binder and filler. It will come in one size only: 5.75 x 47 Perfecto. No idea of the pricing. See below:

I really like the Aging Room Quattro F59 and so will you. Although, the robusto size is more to my taste. You get much more intensity with the smaller stick. I’m sure it would have been set to kill, not stun.
I’m having trouble with the char line for some reason.

Strength hits full body. And drags some nicotine with it. Crash helmet time.

Here they are: Caramel, chocolate, spice, malts, creaminess, coffee, roasted nuts, toasty, dried fruit, herbal notes, and black tea.
Very impressive.

Another quantum leap for the flavor profile after the full body strength kicks in.
I’ve got 2-3/4” to go. And the nicotine and dementia are really fucking with my typing ability.

I’m two hours into this review and I am getting tired. Another reason I prefer a bit smaller sticks. Once I become tired, the dementia really kicks in and I get really confused. Yesterday, I tried lighting a cigar with the TV remote. Took a while but I got it going.

LAST THIRD:
Smoke time is one hour 35 minutes.
In spite of my weariness caused by smoking such a big cigar, I’m having a really good time.
The blend is on cruise control now.

The strength is really taking its toll. Holy cow.

I avoided reading my March, 2013 review of the F55. Now I just did. Lots of similarities. But it seems that the F55 was a milder strength than the F59. I also cannot help but notice the writing technique was far better then than now.

I also reviewed the Aging Room Bin No.1, La Bohéme Pittore, Small Batch T59, Small Batch M21, Aging Room Maduro, and Small Batch M356. All very good cigars.
Nodal is very consistent. A journeyman blender.

I look forward to reviewing the La Bohème Encantador.
This has been a very satisfying blend. I definitely recommend it to experienced smokers. Newbies should stay far away.
The last 1-1/2” is blasting away with bold flavors. No let up.
Be patient and wait for sales.

RATING: 90

PRICE POINT:
$10.25 MSRP. A buck less on CI. Yeah, it’s worth it. Long gone are the days of the great $8 cigar.
We should be glad that it doesn’t cost $14.00. Can you believe all the cigars coming out in this price range? It is absurd and disgusting. I refuse to spend that kind of money on a single stick.
Hopefully, you will see some sales on this cigar in the coming weeks.

SUMMARY:
The Aging Room Quattro F59 is a very big, dense smoke. I can’t understand why I am having so much trouble with the char line. Constant touch ups. If it were not for that, this cigar would have scored higher.
As far as the flavor profile, well..it is something else. A big, bold flavor stick.

And now something to annoy my readers:

I got an email from my daughter, Katie. She referred me to a YouTube music video from the band Fall Out Boy. The song is “Uma Thurman.”
In the song, the boys sample the theme from “The Munsters” TV show. She seems to be literally jumping up and down because I can sue them for using “my” song: “Whatever Happened to Eddie?”

When Butch Patrick came to me, in 1982, at my Long Beach recording studio, he had this idea for a gimmick song. Take the theme from The Munsters” and write timely lyrics. And build a kitschy band around it.

I am a chess player, not a checkers player. I thought immediately that if we could get a big gimmick going with the band and the whole theme of the song, maybe we could get a TV show about Eddie and the Monsters along the lines of The Monkees. I eventually wrote a movie script.

The band members were handpicked and all were good looking guys that would make the tweens swoon in their classroom seats.
Even Butch was a handsome man back then. But weren’t we all? I was 32 and Butch was 30…I believe.

The first thing I did was approach Universal Studios. I needed a license to use the music. They were not about to sit back and watch us get a hit song with their copyrighted music. (We did sell 181,000 units before the record company Rocshire Records went to prison for embezzlement.)
I got a two year license for the song. And it wasn’t easy.

So, dear Katie, I don’t own the music. Especially, since the Fall Out Boys used the original theme and not the music from my 45 single and video.
On top of that, the license has long ago expired. The only thing copyrighted is the lyrics that I allowed Butch to have. And the music video.

But dear Katie, what you don’t know is that I had the presence of mind to get a federal copyright on the music video. This is why you don’t see it anywhere.

Plus, the copyright is good for my lifetime plus 65 years. So after I’m gone, Katie, you can use that copyright to claim rights to the video if someone wants to use it or tries to steal it.

Again, you don’t see it on YouTube either. Several people have tried to upload it but I stopped them in their tracks by filing a copyright infringement with YouTube. The video was always taken down immediately.

Here is the thing. If I allow it on YouTube, it becomes public property. And I lose my rights for sole ownership. I still get copyright fees now and again when a TV show wants to do a child star “Whatever happened to…?”

I get an average of $2500 for a two year license. And the production company will probably use it twice. One original screening and then in rerun.
But I can make no claims to the original theme song…just the music video.

I used to sell packages of the project on eBay. For $100, the buyer got the DVD, 45 single in mint condition, a mint condition Eddie and the Monsters T Shirt, and a Butch autographed 8 x 10 promo photo. I’ve managed to keep everything in air tight storage all these 32 years. I stopped selling them. Too many went unsold.

Since Butch spent a lot of time being drunk, I figured he was going to have an accident and die. THEN! I would have a real package to sell to the highest bidders.
The DVD even has an out take reel.

Butch never speaks of this project anymore because he knows I will profit by it. The only time I hear from him is when he wants something. I finally confronted him and he stopped tracking me down.

I have all the original ¾” video rough cuts, the final ¾” video, DVD’s, about 50 singles, maybe 100 promo photos, the unmixed audio on 8 track, the final stereo ¼” reel to reel tape, and eight T shirts. The only T shirts I have left are small.

If you look for Butch pics online, there are lots of them with him wearing the T shirt.
I always refused to give him the raw video.

Now that Butch is clean and sober, I doubt his death is imminent. But at some point, Katie will probably be able to make use of the copyright and all the chazerai left in my possession. She will make a killing. So to speak.