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Deep in Virginia’s Civil War country is a tobacconist who can wax poetic about General James Longstreet’s love of cigars. He can tell you all about AJ Fernandez and Pepin Garcia. He can tell you more than I can about what 100 different cigars taste like, and about how evenly they burn.
Oh — and he’s 23 years old. I’m not making this up.
On Saturday I visited with Andrew Saylor, the young entrepreneur behind Saylor’s Cigars and Gifts in Manassas, Virginia. He started the shop three years ago at age 20, still not legally able to have a celebratory beer.
Saylor’s father loaned Andrew enough money from his plumbing business in 2009 to start out. It’s profitable now, and the elder Saylor has his investment back, an amount Andrew hinted was in the high-five-figure range.
“I’d be nowhere without my dad,” he told me with great emphasis. “I owe so much to him.”
Today Saylor’s is a thriving strip-mall cigar oasis, sandwiched between a barber shop and a tax-preparation service. It sports leather sofas, a flat-screen TV — playing the Olympics when I visited Saturday evening — and an exhaustive selection of hand-rolled cigars.
The wall opposite the TV is blank. Saylor said he’s reserving it for future photos of his customers.
“Before I opened this, I would — and I don’t know if this is a bad thing to say — but I would go to other cigar shops and think ‘How can I make mine better?'” he told me.
“And the biggest thing I found is customer service. So when I opened this, I knew customer service is key. I’m going to treat you with total respect. Anything you want, I will get. If there’s a cigar you don’t see in here, I’ll do my best to get it. It’s customer service. Treat everybody with respect.”
His young fiancee jumped in, the only one in the shop who wasn’t smoking. “It’s a family atmosphere, because this is a family-run shop.”
“So I treat everyone in here like family,” Saylor added. “Even if they’re giving me a hard time. They’re family.”
How does this wunderkind manage an enterprise like this, I wondered?
“I only have a high school diploma,” he explained. “I never went to college or anything. My dad owns a plumbing business, and I help him run that, so I got some financial experience.”
“But cigar-related? I started smoking at 18, and then around 19 I started trying different things to get different tastes. And I studied it. And once I knew a lot, I wanted to give that knowledge to other people. So why not open a cigar shop?”
He smokes four or five cigars a day, he said — “A minimum of four,” his fiancee insisted — and keeps his place open long after the rest of the strip mall goes to sleep. The sign on his door announces a 10:00 p.m, closing time, but he said that 10 o’clock is just a guideline for days that can end long after midnight.
“I’m not gonna kick you out at 10 if you’re here and you’re having a good time,” he told me. “I’m not gonna kick anybody out.”
When I came in, Saylor was smoking a cigar and talking with a small group of his regulars. The Olympic broadcast switched to an interview with Michelle Obama. And the room became suddenly hollow, reflective.
I asked the group what they thought of the first lady. “My mom works at the Pentagon,” one young man offered. “And I met her once. She seems really — insincere.”
Saylor didn’t take the bait.
“I’m not really into politics, so I really shouldn’t say.”
He is, however, into cigars. Seriously. “I read things online, or I’ll get in contact with distributors” to learn about the trade, he explained. “But mainly I read online, because I like studying. And I like trying new stuff. So when somebody comes in, I can tell them what it tastes like even if I haven’t tried it.”
Saylor told me about the smoke he had just lit, a Diesel “Crucible” that he said was part of a new 2012 line.
“It’s rolled by AJ Fernandez. He’s one of my favorite rollers,” he said, mulling his words like an older aficionado. “It’s about 12 bucks, but it’s really good.”
“Anything from AJ is really nice. I’m a full-bodied smoker, so it’s Don Pepin and AJ. Don Pepin’s stuff is really peppery and really spicy, and I really like that. Sometimes you want full body. But sometimes you want full flavor. That’s when I turn to AJ. It’s not too much pepper, but it’s full of flavor.” (RELATED: Cigar Hunter: Dante’s favorite stogie? Hell yes!)
I bought a Crucible from Saylor — $12.00 even, with a house 10% discount — and we smoked the 6.5-inch by 52 stogies together. True to form, he interrupted our discussion every time a new customer came in.
Fernandez made the Diesel Crucible a fantastic, well-rolled and cosmetically beautiful cigar. It draws like a champ. But he also did something unusual by wrapping it with a “medio tiempo” leaf — one of the rarest in the world. You find it usually in more exclusive — and often more expensive — vitolas like the Cuban Cohiba Behike. (RELATED: Cigar Hunter: Havana comes to Northern Africa)
Tobacco plants generally produce three kinds of leaves: the spicy ligero at the top of the plant, the aromatic seco in the middle and the milder volado near the bottom. But some plants — as few as 10 percent, according to some experts — have a fourth set of leaves at the very top, nearer to the sun. These medio tiempo leaves, just a few per plant, are far smaller, concentrating their aroma and flavor in a tinier package. And they’re fermented for a longer period of time than leaves from the rest of the plant.
Diesel also boasts that it blended a super-secret Honduran specimen into the Crucible, which may account for the intense chocolate bomb I tasted when I lit it up. My mind jumped to the Schokoladenmuseum that the Swiss chocolatier Lindt & Sprüngli runs in the West German city of Cologne. Tasting the front end of this cigar was like sticking my tongue into the museum’s giant smooth milk chocolate fountain.
The second third moved more heavily into coffee and pepper tastes, but remained smoother than I expected, even for a cigar at this price point. The pepper component asserted itself more in the final third, lighting up both the back of my throat and the front of my hard palate.
Diesel has reportedly made just 10,000 of these beauties. Saylor talked about the brand like he’d been smoking them since grade school. He recalled that the first Diesels, made in 2009, were thick belicosos called Unholy Cocktails. Then came the “Shorty,” a fat little stub of a cigar, and a more full-bodied Diesel Unlimited in 2010. I’ve tried that one before — a gargantuan 7-inch double corona with a 60-gauge girth.
Remember: Saylor is a huge AJ Fernandez fan. He pronounced the Diesels “more consistent” than the Man O’War, which “opens up and switches” flavors more quickly. He’s also fond of the newer San Lotano, which Cigar Journal ranked #2 on its list this year. All AJ’s cigars are produced in his Estelí, Nicaragua factory. He started business with just six full-time rollers. Today he makes more than 9 million cigars annually.
Saylor would buy them all if he could. But he’s also fond of Pepin Garcia’s products. One of his regulars was smoking a My Father Flor De Las Antilles.
“It’s a new one Don Pepin put out. It’s really, really smooth,” Saylor said. “It’s definitely a switch-up for Don Pepin. When I first smoked it I was like, ‘Are you sure this is Don Pepin? I’m used to all that pepper.’ I was surprised.”
You can buy the Diesel Crucible online, but you won’t pay much less than the $12.00 I spent. But Saylor said he doesn’t mind if you bargain hunt on the Internet — an unusual sentiment from the proprietor of what is essentially a brick-and-mortar start-up in a competitive global market.
“I don’t knock people who buy them online,” he said with a practiced nonchalance. “I mean, if I were in their shoes I would do the same thing. If I can get them cheaper, I’m going to do it.”
“I have one rule, just one: I don’t care if you bring your own cigars in here, but just find a way to support me. That’s all I ask. And a lot of people can respect that. That’s what I’m really about.”