IPCPR 2019 Spotlight: Crowned Heads

2019 marked the eighth IPCPR Trade Show for the Nashville, Tennessee-based cigar company Crowned Heads. Keeping to their Nashville roots, the Crowned Heads booth had a Nashville-roadhouse music studio flair to it. While a theme around Nashville and music has been a constant for Crowned Heads over the years, 2019 reflected some changes seen by Crowned Heads over the past year.

For the company’s first seven years, Crowned Heads had worked exclusively with two factories – Tabacalera La Alianza (The Dominican factory owned by Ernesto Perez-Carrillo Jr) and My Father Cigars (the Nicaragua factory owned by the Garcia family). While continuing to work with these partners, over the past year Crowned Heads has begun to add additional manufacturing partners.

Late last year, Crowned Heads started working with Drew Estate’s La Gran Fabrica factory. Out of that factory was a regional release known as Buckeye Land. This was followed up by the Hawaiian regional 2019: Crowned Heads Paniolo Especial 2019. Just prior to the trade show, Crowned Heads introduced its first regular production line out of La Gran Fabrica called La Coalición. It’s a project Crowned Heads worked on with Drew Estate Master Blender Willy Herrera and it’s highlighted by a Connecticut Broadleaf wrapper.

Late last year, Crowned Heads announced they were releasing an exclusive cigar to Thompson Cigar known as Juarez. At the 2019 IPCPR Trade Show, the Juarez was made available as a national release. Juarez comes from a factory called Tabacalera Pichardo, a virtually unknown factory. It turns out that this was a precursor to the factory coming out from behind the curtain as Tabacalera Pichardo is the factory behind the high profile A.C.E. Prime releases.