Yesterday we published the final review for cigars that will be considered for the 2022 Cigar of the Year Countdown. Essentially we now begin the 2022-23 Cigar year, and this is a good opportunity to make changes. Today we announce a change to the format of the written Cigar Coop reviews. This is the first format change in almost 4 1/2 years.

Since it was implemented in 2022, the “Appearance” section has served two purposes: 1) Describe the cigar itself; 2) Describe the banding of the Cigar. The idea of describing the banding of the cigar comes from listening to baseball on the radio – namely, it describes the band much like a baseball announcer describes a team’s uniform. While describing the banding of a cigar is certainly fun and intriguing, it also serves as one of the more difficult parts of the review.

The band description is probably the piece I got the least feedback on in over 2000+ reviews. So effective today, the detailed band descriptions will be no more. The description of the cigar and wrapper will remain in the Appearance section. These changes will not apply to Agile Cigar Reviews which are meant to be lighter weight in nature and never contained band descriptions.

At the same time, some feedback I have received is to give more of an assessment to the band itself. Namely – do like it, not like it, are there some unique features, etc.  Therefore there will be a new section called “Banding and Packaging” added to the “OVERALL ASSESSMENT” section that will contain these details.

We are making one other minor tweak. The “References” section will now be broken out of the “OVERALL ASSESSMENT” section into its own section. This change will apply to regular reviews and Agile Cigar Reviews as well.