New Tatuaje Monster Sampler Heading To Retailers
With the ing of Labor Day marking the unofficial end of summer, Pete Johnson of Tatuaje Cigars is setting his sights on the fall season and its notorious—and spooky—holiday. Over the years, Tatuaje’s Monster Series has generated quite the fanfare with cigar smokers and its latest incarnation is unlike any that have come before. Tatuaje Monster Smash is a 14-cigar sampler that includes all 13 Monster series blends, plus a special release, each crafted in a brand-new, box-pressed size. The samplers began shipping to retailers yesterday, on September 3.
Tatuaje has been making Halloween-themed cigars since 2008. Each of the yearly releases of Monster Series cigars featured smokes named after haunting icons from television and film, such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Freddy Krueger. Johnson added another layer to these cult-classic cigars by introducing samplers, starting with the Little Monsters some years back. In 2021, he released Monster Mash, the first sampler to include all 13 Monster Series blends together, which included a special smoke called the Creature, a nod to the 1954 horror movie Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Creature was made entirely from Nicaraguan tobaccos grown by the Garcia family.
This year’s Monster Smash sampler offers more uniformity than previous releases and will include all 14 cigars from before, but this time they are all made in the exact same size: a box-pressed robusto measuring 5 1/4 inches by 52 ring gauge. The lineup includes each of the previous Tatuaje releases: Frank, Drac, Face, Wolf, Mummy, Jason, Jekyll, Hyde, Krueger, Michael, Chuck, Tiff, Bride and Creature.
The cigars are packed in a hinged box that opens like a book, with each side holding seven smokes. The Monster Smash sampler has a suggested retail price of $175 a box, which translates to $12.50 per cigar. Just 13,000 boxes were made, all at My Father Cigars S.A. in Nicaragua.
