Summary: Welcome, everyone, to Half Ashed Episode 015 featuring very special guest William Cooper - who many of you know as Cigar Coop from his information-rich website, one of the premier sources of all the news that's fit to print in the cigar industry.! This week, we're also taking a look at the 2011 Quesada Oktoberfest Bavarian. You'll have to forgive the stock image from their website; I absentmindedly forgot to snap a pic before greedily smoking up my last example of this fantastic cigar. Industry News Two legislative items were up for discussion this week, with the new FDA Tobacco head speaking before the Tobacco Merchants Assocation annual meeting, and some common sense moves in North Carolina. We also covered a few new cigars - from Viaje (thanks to Cigar Coop), La Gloria Cubana's upcoming Nicaraguan cigars, the impending Kelner release, and something new on the shelf from Fuente. Miscellany We covered quite a few cigars from the "What Else Have We Been Smoking" segment, with Craig's special celebratory cigar for his son's second birthday - and discussed the benefit of time on cigars that may not strike your fancy right off the truck. Also, after many years of faithful service, the last bastion of non-beaded humidification in my humidors has died. I laid to rest my trusty old Oasis XL Plus this week. Finally, we covered several listener emails, including those we omitted last week. Wrap A huge thanks to Cigar Coop for sitting in with us on tonight's show. Be sure you all come back next week for Episode 016, when we once again take the opportunity to humble ourselves publicly with an unbanded cigar. This will be Unbanded 004, courtesty of Jacob Pinkas. In the meantime, if you would like to contact us, you can reach us through the contact page or at the following email addresses: kip@thecigarmy.com or craig@thecigarmy.com. Don’t forget to get those emails in this month to be entered in our current giveaway. Also, remember you can always go back and listen to previous episodes, which can be found in the Half Ashed Archive. You can download this week’s audio directly below (right-click “Download” and save), or find us on iTunes. Video, as always, will be available on Cigar Federation homepage or at the CigFed Half Ashed Video Archive. P.S. – As always, if you have unbanded suggestions or contributions, you can get those to us by sending an email to info@thecigarmy.com. This email address goes directly to my wife, so you can simply suggest an unbanded cigar for her to source, or send me an email to kip@thecigarmy.com if you have something you’d like to send in. I will provide an address to send them. Thanks!
