Good morning and happy Tuesday.
This morning I was working in the shop on making a pickguard out of a piece of birdseye maple for my current guitar build. For this build I needed to paint the body so I had my dad spray it, since that’s what he does for a living. While it was at his place getting sprayed, I made a really neat half pickguard from a piece of maple so that it would tie the whole guitar together nicely since the neck is maple with a padauk fretboard with maple inlays. I spent some time working on this half pickguard based on another body that I had handy and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
Once I got the body back from dad, I realized I made a crucial mistake… The body I had him paint was one I made a couple years back and the body I based the half guard on was a recent build. My original body building technique for Telecaster style guitars was traditional and had a few more routes on it, including one between the neck and bridge pickups for running wires. Over the years I have gotten rid of a few routes for ease of building and instead drill holes. So the half pickguard I took the time to make, and looked pretty sweet, ended up not covering the wiring route that I had forgotten was on the body while it was getting painted..
It’s not really an issue. I can use the half pickguard somewhere else, and fortunately I had a nice piece of birdseye maple big enough to make a full pickguard for this build. Honestly, I think the full guard will look better anyhow since it will break up the chrome hardware a bit better (this build has a Bigsby tremolo, so it was a lot of hardware on a black body). The biggest issue with building the full pickguard was that I don’t have a bandsaw with enough capacity to resaw pieces over 6”.. So I had to resaw it by hand and do a lot of clean up work to get it flat and down to thickness. Now I am back on the prowl for a bandsaw..
Anyhow, this morning I smoked a Puro Ambar from Artista Cigars. After my blog post a couple weeks ago about brand recommendations, I have talked to a few brands. Artista was kind enough to send me some samples, so I have been smoking through their stuff and have honestly been pretty impressed!
This week I decided to shake up my giveaway a little bit and instead of a gift card, I am going to award the winner a sampler of Artista Cigars’ Buffalo Ten lineup. One each of the Natural, the Maduro, and the Connecticut!
This week’s giveaway is about samplers: Do you prefer brand samplers or variety samplers? Does it depend?
For me, when I was a consumer I LOVED brand samplers and never really cared for variety samplers. I enjoy discovering new brands and I think that brand samplers are the best way to do that.
To enter to win the Buffalo Ten Sampler, just comment below with your answer. If you want bonus entries - buy a sampler from the site! Each sampler earns an extra entry! It wouldn’t hurt to check out the Deals Page..
Take care,
-Trevor
7 comments
I usually buy 2 brand samplers so I can try each cigar twice to get a better feel for the flavor.
I preferred mixed brand samplers when I was just starting out with cigars. They allowed me to try brands I otherwise wouldn’t have experienced.
Over the years though I honed in on what I preferred and the brand samplers would allow me to try the same blend in multiple formats and experience the differences of the same cigar across its own lineup. Or it would allow me to try out a smaller brands lineup of 3-5 different blends or wrappers.
Today I don’t buy very many samplers and when exploring new sticks I tend to buy 3-5 of each vitola.
To summarize, I believe this will depend on the clientele. If you have mostly newer cigar smokers, multi brand variety packs will likely be the way to go. If your clientele are more experienced or even just older, brand samplers will likely be the best offering.
Well, sometimes you may want to get introduced to a brand. Other times, you may want to see if you can tell the difference between regions, blends, leaves, etc. I think you’d still want a curated or themed variety pack, not just some randoms thrown together.
I’d bet that more people like getting introduced to new brands and so prefer brand samplers.
I would say it depends. My favorite is the brand sampler but I also like samplers with a theme( all Maduro, all made in Costa Rica, cigars great with coffee, etc)
I like brand samplers, most of the time, especially if there is the possibility of brand that has a common blend but with a different wrapper, or something like that, Take the new Essance line, while I know the blend is different, once all the cigars are released that will be a great sampler, Also the same blend in different sizes, so you can really get a feel for how small things have big impacts.