During my week in Estelí, Nicaragua, and the day after my visit to the Las Villas cigar factory I had the privilege of visiting the Rocky Patel farm and factory.
Rocky Patel is a brand started in the mid 90s by a Hollywood lawyer named Rakesh “Rocky” Patel who became passionate about cigars and sold his law practice to start a cigar company. This is a story that is close to my heart. Today Rocky Patel is one of the best known non Cuban brands in the world.
Factory
The people at Rocky Patel were unbelievably generous with their time. I was met by a representative of the company, a girl named Gissell who spoke excellent English, and she took me on a tour of the factory. She walked me through the entire process from rolling the cigars to aging them, banding to boxing them. I was familiar with the process, and it was fresh in my mind for having visited the factory yesterday, but I appreciated seeing how the Rocky Patel factory operates.
It was a big operation, but like all cigar factories, things are pretty simple. It’s a room with long wooden tables, divided into sections, kind of like cubicles in a library, and a person sits at each one and does their job. There’s the person who bunches the tobacco, creating the blend, the person who rolls the tobacco, the person who takes the cigars and puts them into a wooden cigar press to help them hold their shape, the person who applies the wrapper (which is the outside leaf), and the person who takes each cigar and puts it into a little machine that puffs air through it to check to see if it is rolled correctly. If the cigar is rolled too tight you can’t smoke it easily, and if the cigar is rolled to loosely it burns too quickly and too hot. The man who does the testing keeps track of whose cigars or not meeting the standard.
rollers
We also visited the room where women de-vein the tobacco leaves, the and the room where men are sorting the cigar leaves into bundles to make the blends, weighing them, and keeping the records. Everything is done by hand. Pen and paper.
The factories are warm. There are fans but you can’t have air conditioning blowing on the tobacco. Tobacco is a sensitive product that needs to be kept warm, but not too warm; and humid but not too humid.
The atmosphere of the room is nice. People seem to be having a good time, or as much as you can while working. A lot of them have headphones in but others are chatting with each other as they roll cigars, but they are working quickly. A perfect marriage of speed and precision is desirable. I tried rolling a cigar once and I know first-hand that it is not as easy as they make it look.
After the cigars are rolled, they are aged in bundles on shelves for anywhere from a few months to up to a year before they are boxed and sold.
When it is time for the cigars to be boxed, there is someone whose job it is to separate the cigars into different shades of brown, to ensure that when you buy a box of cigars there is a uniform colour of the cigars in the box. This is purely for aesthetics. The lighter coloured cigars go with the lighter coloured cigars and the darker with the darker coloured cigars. In Cuba, it is said that they separate the cigars into 40 different shades of brown. I don’t know if that’s accurate or if it’s true in Estelí, but the man who was doing the colour organizing certainly had a lot of different shades of brown on the table in front of him.
The cigars are banded, again, by hand, and put into boxes for distribution and sale.
Just as with the day before, I felt amazed by the level of work that goes into making each cigar and how little it has changed over the centuries.
When the tour of the factory was finished, we were joined by Luis, a former lawyer himself, and we took a drive out to the farm.
Farm
This was a new experience for me. I had visited a tobacco farm in Cuba, but at the time the plants had been harvested so it wasn’t much to see. Being at the Rocky Patel farm in Estelí, I was giddy with excitement. It was stunning. The header image on this post is a view of the field. Bright green plants against a clear blue sky. It looked like heaven.
I wandered to the fields and took pictures and gently caressed leaves like a real weirdo.
Another thing I hadn’t seen before, was tobacco flowers. These are the flowers that grow on the tobacco plant. They’re pink! I had no idea.
Right near the fields, were large barns where the tobacco goes after it’s harvested.
Once the leaves are harvested, they go into the barn where they are hung on wooden rods high up into the barns rafters. When they’re hung up, they’re green and as they dry, they turn brown. The racks of leaves are rotated to ensure that they all get uniform humidity and exposure. As with every other aspect of cigar production, this is all done by hand. Women string the tobacco leaves into long garlands; men take the tobacco leaf garlands up into the rafters and hang them over the wooden beams. The barn smells incredible.
They told me that once a year they have fancy dinners in the barn where they bring in a large table and eat and drink surrounded by tobacco. I tried unsuccessfully to wrangle an invitation.
We then visited the building where the tobacco was put into, effectively, big piles, where it ferments for up to a year. The tobacco must be kept at a very stable state of humidity and temperature, and it is monitored constantly.
Finally, and a bit out of sequence, we visited the greenhouses where the little tobacco seedlings start their lives. Future cigars. I have never been so excited to visit a nursery.
The people at Rocky Patel were so wonderful. Explaining to me the entire process, tolerating my ceaseless enthusiasm, and not laughing too hard at me when I tripped walking in the field and landed in a muddy creek. At the end of the visit, they gave me a small gift box with an assortment of their cigars. There’s no people like cigar people.
I felt so lucky to have been able to visit these two factories. An at the time that I visited Rocky Patel I thought that it would be the second of two factory visits that I would make; but that afternoon I got an e-mail arranging for me to visit Plasencia the next day, which would be my final day in Estelí.
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