Day Two
Another amazing day at the Perdomo Cigars factory in Esteli, Nicaragua. After a terrific breakfast, we headed back to the factory for a tour of the cigar box manufacturing facility. The tour was conducted by a 31-year old Nicaraguan called “David”. He showed tremendous passion for the entire process and went into lots of detail.
One of the things that sets Perdomo apart from most other cigar manufacturers is that they make nearly everything themselves. In fact, we were told that the only things that they don’t make are the ribbons on the cigars (aka the bands) and the hinges on the boxes. Everything else is made on site.
As far as manufacturing the cigar boxes, it of course starts with the trees. Perdomo have an agreement with the Nicaraguan government that they can chop down as many trees as they like – as long as they plant two for every tree they chop down. So they get their own timber and then David showed how it is cut down into planks of various lengths and widths. Then the timber is dried – either on the roof when the weather is fine or inside under heating during the wet season. This is to make sure there’s very little moisture in the boxes which could affect the cigars. The timber is then sawn into smaller and smaller sections to make up the various pieces of the boxes. They are cut down, sanded, embossed, glued, lacquered, painted, stained, polished and, in the case of the Edicion De Silvio boxes, inlaid with finely-lathed cedar. Each box is then carefully dusted with a cloth and placed inside an individual plastic bag to stop any dust getting on it before it gets to the packaging room.
Perdomo Cigars box factory, Esteli, NIcaragua
It’s an amazing and somewhat-humbling experience to walk from one end of the factory, where you see raw timber, through the entire process of refinement until it becomes a beautiful cigar box that is really a work of art. Billy Perdomo told us that while the process to create a box from start to finish usually takes about 1 – 2 weeks, if they HAD to, in an emergency they could turn out a new box in about one-and-a-half hours. I’m talking about taking a TREE and turning it into a beautiful cigar box in one-and-a-half hours. Amazing.
After lunch, we had our in-depth tour of the rolling process. We’d had a walk through on the first morning, but this time we had the entire process explained and demonstrated. And let me start by saying – this is an ART. My following explanation isn’t going to do it the tiniest bit of justice. I know because I got to try my hand at rolling one and it was HARD WORK.
Before the cigars can be rolled, that day’s tobacco needs to be brought in from the curing barns. Depending on which cigars are being rolled that day, the correct supply of leaves will be brought in from the barn in large crates. These are then sorted into piles according to type and grade by a room full of women who also de-vein the leaves (ie remove the larger veins from them). What you end up with is a leaf that looks and feels like a very delicate sheet of leather.
Girls from the rolling room them come to a window at the sorting room and place their leaf order. They are presented with a bundle of leaves and everything is recorded (who got the leaves, who many they got, which type and grade, etc). One of the impressive things about the Perdomo operation is all of the checks and balances that are in the place. It’s an extremely well run operation. These girls then take the leaves to the rolling tables.
Cigars are rolled in teams of two people – a buncher and a roller. Now the obvious question – are they rolled on the thighs of virgins? Well I wouldn’t want to speculate upon the virginal status of the rollers but as Nicaragua is made up of about 95% Catholics, I guess the younger rollers might be virgins? However as ages varied greatly, I don’t think that’s going to lead to many virginal rollers. And no, they don’t roll them on their thighs, virgins or no.
Perdomo Cigars rolling room, Esteli
In Perdomo, they work on steel tables because it’s cleaner and impervious to water damage (as opposed to wooden tables, that is, not as opposed to a virgin’s thigh, the cleanliness of which I wouldn’t care to speculate upon either). The buncher takes a set of dried tobacco leaves – as determined by the recipe for the particular cigar they are making that day – and literally bunches them together. He (or she, but bunchers tend to be men and rollers tend to be women, because rolling requires a more delicate touch) then uses a special, manual rolling tool to tightly roll the leaves up into a cigar shape and wrap them in a ‘binder’ leaf. This leaf doesn’t add much to the flavour of the cigar, it’s literally there just to bind the inner leaves. He then places the cigar into a mould than takes about ten ’sticks’ and makes sure that it is the right length and width (aka ‘ring gauge’). Each cigar, of course, will be different, depending on what they order is for. After the buncher has prepared ten cigars and placed them into the mould, he puts the top on the mould and it goes into a compressor – something that looks like a giant nut-cracker, about 3 feet high, which is used to put pressure on the cigars for a few hours, so they keep their shape.
Every single cigar now goes through the ‘Drawmaster’ – a tool that looks somewhat like a medieval torture instrument or kinky sex device but which actually tests the ‘draw’ on the cigar (ie how easily air can be drawn through it). Perdomo has six of these machines in their rolling room. I heard that in all of Cuba there are only two such machines. That’s another reason why Perdomo’s cigars are so uniform when you smoke a box of them. Each and every stick has been tested before it leaves the factory. I don’t even want to think about how many millions of sticks that is every month.
The next day, the ‘roller’ has the job of taking these cigars and putting the ‘wrapper’ and the ‘cap’ on them. This involves taking a single leaf and stretching it out. They have to turn the leaf over so that the side with the most noticeable veins is facing upwards. That’s so the veins are hidden inside the cigar, making the cigar more attractive when it’s completed. They then use a blade that looks a little like a baker’s dough knife to slice off the outer edges of the leaf, turning it into a neat banana shape. The cigar is then places on one end of the wrapper and rolled parallel to the major veins in the leaf. When the wrapper has been wrapped around the entire cigar, a small amount of a clear, firm jelly-like vegetable gum is used to glue down the cap section (ie the end you put in your mouth). This glue has no taste – I tried some. The roller then smoothes out the cap section by running her thumb around it, flattening it down, and twisting the left over wrapper like twisting off a plastic bag. The excess wrapper is then cut off with the knife. Now the roller takes that excess wrapper, smoothes it out, and uses a small metal tool that looks like an empty shotgun cartridge and uses the round end to cut a circular piece of wrapper. This ‘cap’ is then glued onto the cap of the cigar, again using the vegetable gum. It’s smoothed down to make a perfect tip (of course, I’m not talking about ‘torpedo’ cigars here which have a pointed cap and the process is slightly different). The cigar is then placed in a tool which trims it to the perfect length and – voilà! – the cigar is finished!
Kind of.
Before we go on, let me tell you that each roller produces 300 cigars a day. In an 7 hour working day (they get a few breaks through the day), that’s about 42 cigars an hour or 0.7 cigars per minute. When I had a go at wrapping a cigar, it took me about 5 minutes – and I sucked at it. I asked Sara Gonzales, Perdomo’s Head Of Production and who has been in the cigar business for 36 years, how long it takes for someone to go from being a beginner to a good roller and she said about a year. That’s before they can roll without being supervised. At Perdomo, the new rollers start up the back of the room and work their way up to the front row, which is reserved for the rock stars.
Right, so… The cigars are now bundled together into piles of 50 and placed into ANOTHER ageing room. This room is amazing – imagine a room filled with shelves and shelves of cigars, millions of them. They sit in this room for anywhere from 3 years and upwards. This is called the “marrying” process as it helps the flavour of the cigars “marry” with each other. Basically it means that the flavours will seep between the cigars, making them uniform. It also allows more of the toxins to escape from the cigars (ammonia, nitrogen, etc). The longer a cigar ages, the smoother it should be and the less toxins it will have in it, making it healthier (and I’m not suggesting cigars are ‘healthy’ for you, at all, just that the more toxins removed, the ‘less bad’ for you they are). As I mentioned in the previous Esteli blog post, on our first day, Billy gave each of us a State Selection stick from 2005 – they had been sitting in there for 5 years. Needless to say, it was a very smooth smoke.
Jason Nelson in the Perdomo ageing room, Esteli
Okay so… the cigars go into this room and sit there for a few years or more.
When an order is placed, the correct cigars are removed from the marrying room and are sent to the packaging room.
Every stick is now checked by three ladies who sit up the back of the room. EVERY STICK. They are checked for quality (which, by the way, has already been done by supervisors on the rolling room floor, but this is a secondary checking system, remembering that the cigars have been sitting in the ageing room for a few years or more) and sorted by colour. Obviously every cigar leaf is unique and so each wrapper is going to be a slightly different shade than the next, so these ladies sort the sticks into bundles of colour, trying to match them as closely as possible. Every single Perdomo cigar that hits the marketplace has been touched by one of these three ladies. Amazing.
They are then given to another group of ladies who put the ribbons or bands on them, inserts them into individual cellophane sleeves (by the way, Perdomo is the only cigar manufacturer that makes it’s own cellophane – oh and the cellophane breathes, which means you can leave them in the cellophane when you put them in your humidor), then puts them carefully into the cigar boxes, making sure they are all looking immaculately uniform and pristine. They don’t just shove them in – you should see these ladies work, you’d almost swear they were archaeologists dealing with 5000 year old antiquities. Then then place inside the box any special sleeves that are required. For example, the Perdomo Lot 23 boxes have a certificate detailing when the tobacco was grown, how long it has been aged for, who developed the blend, etc. Finally, the box is carefully wiped down and given a polish. They are then shrink-wrapped and placed into cartons for delivery.
I’m going to apologize again – the above tale doesn’t even BEGIN to do justice to the entire process and I’ve probably forgotten a step or two, or not given it enough detail, or even screwed something up. I hope my colleagues who were on the tour will correct me where I’m in error.
But I just wanted to give you an idea of the amount of work, care and pride that goes into making each and every Perdomo cigar.
And to think – in Australia we can buy the finished product started around $20 a stick – it’s amazing.
I want to finish by saying a few things about working conditions at the factory. Obviously Nicaragua is a country where the people are going it tough. I mentioned in an earlier post that about 46% of the population is underemployed and that about 80% earn less than US$2 a day. As someone who has had a keen interest in the Latin American political situation for 20 years, I really wanted to see first-hand the conditions that Perdomo’s employees work under. Are the factories clean and sanitary? Do the employees seem happy or stressed? Do they seem like they are working in harsh conditions because they have no choice or are they proud of what they do? Are they being paid a reasonable wage for their country?
I can honestly tell you that I was seriously impressed with nearly every single aspect of the conditions that Perdomo’s employees work under. The factory rooms are all spotlessly clean (we saw people constantly sweeping and mopping throughout the day), well lit, and air-conditioned. The employees are allowed to wear headphones and many were listening to their own music. We saw lots of smiles, laughter, and bantering between the staff and the supervisors and managements. I’m sure that as with any workplace, there are people with gripes or who just don’t like going to work each day, but overall they seemed like a happy bunch. I’m told that, on average, Perdomo pay their staff about three times the national average salary. Perhaps that’s why every day there is a large group of people lined up outside the gates of the Perdomo factory, trying to get a job. Remember that this is a country where half of the population don’t even have a job. Esteli is also a major cigar producing region, with many cigar manufacturers besides Perdomo, so there is some competition for good staff and that forces wages upwards. I also know that Perdomo works closely with the Nicaraguan government (currently run by the socialist FSLN party who fought the revolution against the dictator Somoza in the 70s) to make sure conditions and salary levels are constantly improving. Nick also told us they have a doctor on site and a great health insurance plan.
My only concern while I was there was for the people who work in the rooms where the tobacco is fermenting. The smell of the nitrates in those rooms is incredible. It burned my throat and nostrils the second I walked in there. I only saw one person wearing a face mask in these rooms. When we asked the staff there why they don’t wear face masks, they told us “you get used to it”. We asked Nick Perdomo about those fumes later on when we were back in Miami and he assured us they aren’t harmful and that he could sleep in one of those rooms quite comfortably.
Overall, I have to say I am very proud of Perdomo’s working conditions. While it’s always heart-wrenching to see a people whose country has been devastated by colonialism, wars and dictators for centuries, and who live in abject poverty by Western standards, Perdomo is not only giving them desperately needed work, but is paying them above average wages and providing excellent working conditions.
On the last day of our trip, we visited the Perdomo HQ in Miami and spent some time interviewing Nick Perdomo for an upcoming series of videos.
Jason, Nick and Cameron
I really need to thank Nick and his wife Janine for their amazing hospitality while we were in Miami and also Billy Perdomo for being a wonderful host and guide during our visit to Nicaragua. I can’t wait to take some customers back on the trip with us next year!
