As much as I love pairing cigars with coffee, a decent coffee shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to finish, while a cigar can last so much, especially if it's a Partagas Lusitania like the one I smoked yesterday. When smoking it I remembered something a so-called habanos expert once told me when I asked him why he always used the word creamy to describe flavors. I had always thought it was related to the cream flavor, as in vanilla and a sort of milky component, but he told me that in cigars this meant when the smoke texture is kind of oily and the flavors stick to the palate for a long time. That sort of creaminess came to mind often when smoking the Lusitanias.
Even this coffee being a macchiato, the pairing was great thanks to the flavors of vanilla, pepper, oak, nuts and chocolate in the Lusi, while the coffee had all the creamy texture that kept those flavors on the palate as long as possible, and the milky flavors I assumed originally.
I realized that coffee can pair with one of the thirds and not necessarily the whole thing. I paired this macchiato with the first third of the cigar and then went into some sparkling water and the result was amazing. Here's another experimenting I'm going to go into, with each third of the cigar.
by Cocodrool