Types of Cigar Tobacco

Video Transcript

"Here we're going to talk about the Seco leaf. Seco leaf is a very essential component of filler. It’s one of the milder tobaccos used in the filler. It comes from either the fourth or fifth priming of the plant, and as you’re priming a plant of tobacco, you start your first priming which uses the mud leaf, which they don’t use. Second and third priming are a good size leaf, they don’t get a lot of sun, so they are usually used for wrapper. Fourth and fifth they tend to get a little more rusty looking like this, and you also get a little more flavor, because when you pull out those lower primings, there is not as much of the plant to feed, so you get the Seco. Seco is generally one of the more robust components of the filler blend because it is such a thin leaf and you can get more in there. So it’s pretty much your component that builds up the body of a cigar, it pretty much makes up the thickness you want and stuff like that. You can use a good amount, because it is a thin leaf. Ligero, as you can tell, is a lot thicker of a leaf, so you can’t really you as much of this in a cigar. This is the last priming of a cigar plant, so it gets all the nutrients and all the sun, because all the rest of the leaves are off the plant before they pull this, so its pretty much the strongest component of the cigar. You’ll notice on some cigars they talk about double or triple Ligero, stuff like that. What that means is they just use a little more of this in the blend so you get a little more robustness, more flavor. Where Seco is the filler, this is the spice. This will give you the kick, the body that's inside of a cigar. It's a pretty rough leaf, so you have to really be able to gauge how much of this you can put in. It's a very thick leaf so it takes up a lot of space, so you don't use nearly as much of this as you would the Seco, because the Seco is a thinner leaf. We're going to be talking about the binder leaf, which is actually not a very good looking leaf, but it's very stretchy. This is what holds the bunch together, which is actually all of the filler components. Now after you bind the cigar with a binder, you actually put it into the press, and it forms a cigar. This is usually wrapper that doesn't meet the aesthetic grade and is usually a little thicker than what they would generally use for wrapper. So it's used as binder, and like I said, the main reason they use this is because it's stretchy and it does hold together pretty good because it is a thick, thick leaf. You can tell, it's not that thin."