2021 Year in Review: Country of Origin Performance Rankings

The Performance Rankings were introduced in 2012 as a statistical analysis based on the average numerical score of all cigars assessed on Cigar Coop. It is meant to serve as a barometer in terms of how the cigars were assessed.

Today we slice this data by Country of Origin – a category introduced for 2015. This is not meant to be an award, but a look at how scoring went, and what can we learn from it.

For the 2021 year, a total of 163 (down from 172 in 2019) cigars were considered for this analysis. The average score for the entire set of 163 cigars was 89.06. (Statistically, this was down 0.39 points from 2020 when the average was 89.45)

We used the following criteria to implement this:

The cigar must have its score published during the period of November 1, 2019, through October 31, 2020.
All cigars scored were eligible regardless of release date. The goal here is to see how the country of origin performed during the Cigar Coop Cigar Year.
The majority of the cigars smoked are from the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. As a result, these three countries have a significantly larger sample set than other cigar-producing countries. Therefore, the sampling data has been divided into two groups – small and large. A large sampling group had 16 or more cigars assessed.

Large Sampling Data > =16 Cigars

Rank	Country	Avg Score # of Cigars (2021)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2020)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2019)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2018)	Difference (2021 vs. 2020)
1	Nicaragua	89.30 (101)	89.67 (85)	89.96 (91)	90.97 (90)	– 0.37
2	Dominican Republic	88.69 (36)	89.45 (51)	90.19 (53)	90.59 (66)	– 0.76
3	Honduras	88.63 (16)	89.28 (25)	90 (17)	90.14 (22)	– 0.55

Small Sampling Data <16 Cigars

Small sampling data is included mostly for completeness. The set of data from these countries is too small to make any assessments as a whole.

Rank	Country	Avg Score # of Cigars (2021)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2020)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2019)	Avg Score # of Cigars (2018)	Difference (2020 vs. 2020)
1	United States	87.5 (2)	90.5 (2)	89.66 (3)	91.83 (6)	-3
2	Costa Rica	91.0 (2)	90.0 (2)	91.33 (3)	91.50 (8)	+1
3	n/a	88.4 (5)	89.5 (2)	89.33 (3)		-1.1
3	Italy	87 (1)	87 (1)	85.00 (1)		0.00
3	n/a		85.75 (4)	85.00 (1)		n/a
3	Mexico			91.00 (1)	90.00 (1)	n/a

Assessing the Results

This year Nicaragua was the top-performing country of the “large data sets” (Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua) for the second year in a row. It’s the fourth time in five years Nicaragua topped the rankings among these countries.
Once again, scoring continued to go down – consistent with scoring going down as a whole on Cigar Coop.
While Nicaragua led Honduras and the Dominican Republic in 2021, it has taken over a 2-point drop in scoring since 2018 – more than the other two countries.
There was a disproportionate amount of Nicaraguan cigars that were smoked. There were 65 more Nicaraguan than Dominican cigars smoked. That is mostly due to an increase in Nicaraguan exports.
Cigars produced in the United States, Costa Rica, and Italy were reviewed in 2021, but each of these countries had a small set of data and they are only included for reference purposes.