Welcome To The Perdomo Podcast

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the world of Perdomo Cigars. We deliver the most authentic in-depth cigar education to you, the cigar enthusiast. Recorded at the Perdomo Studio in Miami, Florida, brought to you by third and fourth generation master cigar makers. This is the Perdomo Podcast. Your hosts, Nick and Nicholas Perdomo.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Welcome back, everybody, to the Perdomo Podcast. I am Nicholas Perdomo, and I'm alongside my dad, Nick Perdomo. And today we have a really special one for everybody, Dad. Today we're going to talk about why fermentation is so important with tobacco, but we're going to do something very different. We're actually going to be doing a new theme within, just like within the Perdomo Podcast, just like the Perdomo Podcast Cigar Mythbusters, today we're going to be doing our virtual experience where we're going to take you to Estely, Nicaragua with us. And specifically, Dad, one of the things that we're going to be talking about and showing everybody is we're going to take today, we're going to take you inside one of the most important, but really one of the most least understood parts of premium cigar making, and that is fermentation. And fermentation is where great tobacco becomes exceptional. And that's really, I look at you as the fermentation king, and you guys are going to understand why I say that. I I love fermentation. It's it's a big thing. It is. It is. It's everything. It's going to be fun. It's going to be a lot of fun. And we're going to show you exactly what happens to tobacco way before it ever even becomes a cigar. And you guys are going to come, like I said earlier, you guys are going to come with us to Nicaragua. And so, Dad, I want to give a little bit of a backstory before we all jump to Nicaragua. First, what are you smoking? I just come in. That's fine. I'm smoking a beautiful Podomo Legacy, Nicaraguan Shade Grown, Gran Bellicoso six by 48 by 60. How about yourself? Me too. Yeah, me desk. We got great taste.

Why We Built A Virtual Tour

SPEAKER_02 1:56

And so basically, you know, one of the things, Dad, like going back, you know, fermentation and the backstory of the virtual podcast, right? Going into this virtual experience. And I want to give the backstory really where we sit down two to three days a week, and we're always brainstorming because we want to give our audience more and more. And so we sit down with pencil and paper, and you said, hey, why not take the show to everybody? You know, and I think it's a great opportunity too for people to inquire about the Pronomo Factory Tour. So we have many different segments that we're going to be showing you guys and bringing you guys with us to Estely, Nicaragua. And but we want we want guys to see our factory. I want everybody to see how how big, how the quality of all our different pre-industries, our our all our different our rolling facility, all the different areas that we have, all our different processes. And I think it's gonna I think a lot of people are gonna be intrigued about going to Estley, Nicaragua on our factory tour.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that that love it and are very passionate as much as we are.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

And I see it throughout all the years that we've done the trips and how much you know people really enjoy it. And it fires me up when the customers and the consumers come out and and come out and see us, and everybody's welcome and we love it.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Yeah. So without further ado, Dad, I think it's time. I think it's time we jump on our little pad. Let's go to Nicaragua. Let's take you guys with us. We'll see you guys in a minute. See you soon.

On The Ground In Esteli

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Hey everybody, welcome to Estely, Nicaragua. We're here at Tobacco Air Prodomo. This is our pre-industry. And today, as we were talking about on our Prodomo podcast, why fermentation is so important. I'm gonna let my dad talk about it, but we wanted to bring you guys here to Nesteli, Nicaragua, and see it. So you're I'm glad you guys are here with us. So, Dad, we want to talk about fermentation and really why it's so important. So, if you can go through the steps in terms of what makes our cigar so special, but really why fermentation is so important.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Absolutely.

Pilones And The Low Slow Method

SPEAKER_01 3:54

What better place to be right here in Nicaragua where you can see it firsthand? So basically, when we get to tobaccos here, you'll notice these are what we call farmer bales, and these are the tobaccos that come once they're cured in the curing barns. And this is different than the fermentation process. But if you look, the colors are beautiful. They're they're reddish-brown colors, but these tobaccos are real tacky. And if you smell them, they smell almost like honey wheat bread. Beautiful. A lot of sugars, resins, they're nice and sticky, they smell great. But what we want to do is we want to build the fermentation process. So, what we do is when we bring them in from the curing barns, we're gonna go into the initial fermentation, give us first fever, like like the Cubans say all the time. And what we do is we build these for fermentation piles that we call pilones. In the old days, we would take our hands in there, and my dad would say, Boy, this tobacco's ready. This we need to turn this because we have to keep this fermentation. It's basically like a compost pile that keeps fermenting. And what we want to do is we want to build the heat up naturally to about 105 degrees. My mother always said that great pot roast is low and slow, and we believe tobacco should be low and slow. We don't really like to tax it by giving it a tremendous amount of pressure. And really, it's like great barbecue. The lower and slower, and the time, more time you give it, the tender the more tender the meat is, and the tobacco becomes more and more flavorful. So that we're a big believer in that. Then we had big thermometers, now we have lasers where we can go in. So as the tobacco starts evolving, you'll notice it starts getting a little darker, right? So, Nicholas, give me a hand here. And this is the succession is this tobacco. What happens starts getting a little darker brown versus those lighter blonde colors. And what happens is we have these clinical charts, just like you would see in a hospital. So this is tobacco from Esteli. This came in last year in January from one of our farms, Consuelo. This is from the 24-25 crop, this is a seed variety, and this is the total weight, 3,376 pounds. Once the tobacco hits between 105 and 107 degrees, what we do is we deconstruct this puzzle. And the reason we do it is to build equal fermentation. Tops go to the bottom, bottoms go to the tops, insides go to the outsides, outsides go to the inside. Equal distribution of pressure. Remember when Nichols was eight years old, we had him building some of these fermentation piles. And my father always said, if you're gonna walk the walk, you gotta talk to talk. And if you look at the evolution, you start seeing these tobaccos getting even darker. They're getting now a more reddish-brown color. See how we have little spots of oil and stuff going here. We need to make sure we blend that into the tobacco leaf. And the secret of tobacco, believe it or not, Nicholas, and we know about this, but it's the tips of your fingers, it's your nose and your eyes. If those fingers touch that tobacco and they tack, that means that tobacco needs more fermentation. The smell, when we get that solid tobacco core of smell, we know it's ready, and the eyes will show us when we finally come up and look at tobacco like this. It's a little over four years old. And look at these beautiful colors. Now they're a reddish brown, no tackiness. And when you open up and smell, what's it smell like?

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Well, this is our darker tobacco, it smells sweet, it's got a bunch of just you smell all those flavors, everything that you imagine when we make those cigars and we use these special filler tobaccos from Estelie, because this is all tobacco from Estelie, like my dad mentioned. It's just got a tremendous amount of richness. It's going to be super, super special.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

But you break down all those sugars, those resin, those olds, and that's where you get the flavor. And then finally, we come here, and this tobacco is actually five years old. And if you look at these tobaccos, you'll see they're like thick, they're really heavy. This is what we call our lighter tobaccos. And if you see these tobaccos are just perfect, and these are ready, and this is what total fermentation is all about. And depending on what valley the tobacco comes from, is how long it's going to take. So secos, which are light tobaccos, we talked about previously in the previous podcast, takes anywhere between 18 and 24 months. Visos take anywhere between 32 and 36 months, and lietos like this take or upwards to 60 months or five years. It's very important that the fermentation process is done right. And I think it's what makes our tobacco so special. We take a longer time than most, but because my father always believed that we should ferment tobacco low and slow, it's worked really good for us.

SPEAKER_02 8:18

It has worked really good for

First Sweat And Moisture Control

SPEAKER_02 8:20

us. So we've already talked about, you know, in fermentation, we talked about tobacco coming that's cured, right? And then going into the piles to be fermented. So prior, it's a great point. One of the things we wanted to show was how tobacco, when it comes from the curing barns, how we properly moisten the tobacco and why we do it. So if you could talk about that, how we wet it.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

So the the first thing is a great question. The first thing we do is when the tobacco comes from the farmer bales, we actually give it what we call its first sweat. And what do we do is we take the fluids that are embedded into the tobacco leaves from the curing barns and we give it its first sweat. That sweat takes between 72 and 96 hours. So what happens is that tobacco heats up slowly to about 95 to 100 degrees, but it loses all its moisture. Right. The fermentation stops. Now we have to go into the initial second fermentation where the tobaccos are going to be fermented and age anywhere between two to five years, depending on the types of tobaccos and the textures. So the first thing we do here is we're going to take the hands of tobacco with these fine misting sprinklers, and we're going to wet the tobacco. So what we do is we take the hands of the tobacco, and basically what we're doing is, you'll see here in a moment, you'll see the sprinklers. What we're going to do is we're going to turn them in a 306-degree radius so we can have a consistent amount of moisture. Then what you're going to see is the guys are going to shake the tobacco out three times. The reason we shake that tobacco out is so we don't have live water droplets. We want to humidify the tobacco. We don't want to, we don't want to punish the tobacco. So what happens is we won't have those spots that you see in a lot of cigars where you'll see like a green spot or a white spot. That's because the tobacco had live water on it. And it basically, under fermentation, because they didn't shake it out completely, you're going to get those marks, and we don't want to have them. And then what happens is after they do that, they tie them in hands of 144 leaves and we stand them up. And the reason we stand them up and we tie them is so the water goes down. And basically what we're doing is we're building kind of like a vortex of humidity, right? Where we're building an updraft and a downdraft. And what happens is it basically radiates completely around those hands. And what we do is we tie them and we put burlap over the top so they can breathe. The reason we're sitting on this queen is because we want that moisture to go down, but we know the concrete is porous, but we want to maintain that moisture. So what happens is because it's non-permeable here in this plastic, we'll get those updrafts of humidity and downdrafts. We'll leave this in for 24 hours, and tomorrow morning it'll be perfectly supple, completely humidified. We're ready to put in the pilons. And that's what we do.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Awesome. This is great. Really great information. We wanted to share this with you guys. I'm glad that we brought this to you guys. And, you know, today with our Podomo podcast being on fermentation. We have our podcast. We're about to all go back to Miami together pretty soon. But it's one of those things we wanted to bring you here. This is what we call our virtual podcast. This is one of the first of many that we're going to be doing where we show you guys the steps and really what makes tobacco and great cigars so special, but specifically Podomo cigars and why we're so great. So thank you guys so much. Let's get back to Miami. Well,

Back In Miami Big Takeaways

SPEAKER_02 11:28

we're back and welcome back to Miami, Florida, here at the Podomo Podcast Studio here in Miami Lakes, Florida. So, Dad, there's a lot to take away. So, going through everything from how we ferment and how we take the cured tobaccos and all those colors that we went through and we showed everybody, all the powerhouse tobaccos, the hide primings, which are higher up in the plant, all those tobaccos from Esteli. And I think that we showed some incredible, just the progression of the leaf, the progression of texture, of color, of smell. And like how you said with that cured tobacco, it smells like that honey wheat bread, and it goes to that rich, dark chocolate color that we use for our Lejo tobaccos.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

This is really cool. I love it. I mean, it's what we do for a living, and I'm glad you guys got to see it firsthand.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, you know, going back to when we started, where it's probably one of the most misunderstood processes, because everybody knows and they've seen so many videos of how cigars get made, of you know, tobacco in the fields and things like that. But really, fermentation is so misunderstood and really not understood at best, and to be honest with you. And I think our audience, I think you guys understand it better. But if there's some points I'd like to leave you guys with, and really I want you guys to think about, is that fermentation, again, it transforms all the cured tobaccos through fermentation into that flavorful type of high-quality tobaccos that premium cigars are known for, specifically Perdomo cigars, of course. And if anything, it creates smooth flavors, the complexity and the aroma that you guys crave when you guys look to smoke a prodomo cigar. And Dad, it's it's one of those things I I remember when you, you know, you always taught me fermentation, you got to treat it like a baby. You know, when you ferment tobacco, you gotta watch those pilones, those piles of tobacco that we looked at. And I remember you told me you gotta you, it's like putting the baby to sleep, a newborn. You gotta come in, you check it, make sure the baby, it's like when I was a kid, used to air out my blankets, make sure I wasn't too hot because I would have maybe caught on fire like a like a pilone. Just kidding. And you know, so it's one of those things, the constant attention to detail, all those things that you that that you've created and all the different processes that you've created within our our company through fermentation and all the standards.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Yeah, it's kind of funny you talk about lifting up your blanket to cool you down. It's the same thing with tobacco. So when we break down those pilones, believe it or not, we have to shake that tobacco out because we have to dissipate the heat that it's already been built naturally. And the reason we want to dissipate that heat is because when we rebuild those pilones, we can actually get a combustible fire because they're so hot that we want to we don't want to keep accelerating that. So we cool all those tobaccos down before we rebuild them, even though we only bring that temperature up, like you saw when we were in Nicaragua at 105 degrees. I just believe in low and slow, and I don't believe in taxing that tobacco, and you get more sugars, more resins, more oils, and more flavor at the end. And when you really look at in conclusion, you just get an incredible tasting cigar when you'll see later when we go into the barrel aging and so on. So I'm excited that I'm glad everybody got to see what we do here.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Yeah, and I think one of the biggest things, I think one of the biggest takeaways that you guys will see, and it was a little detail, but it's a huge detail, like our clinical chart, basically, where you show the date, all the temperature controls, how many times it's been turned, how many times that tobacco in the piles and the bilonas have gone from the outside in, the inside out, top to bottom, bottom to top. And so all of that work, just and just that that marinating of all those flavors and rounding out the harshness. And those are the points. So when you guys think about fermentation, you really don't understand, just remember it's about refinement, it's about making tobacco smoother, about bringing those oils, all those sugars really into the tobacco and making it come up and make that cigar so refined and so just flavorful.

Charts Sensors And 24 7 Fermentation

SPEAKER_01 15:24

But and another thing, too, is it's a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation because those pilonas are gonna fire up at 11 o'clock at night, at three in the morning, or at seven in the morning. And we have new technology with the sensors, the iPads, even the the temperature probes, when we go in, we know whether it'd be Saturday afternoon with Pilone 182 is gonna hit 105 degrees, and that's how we can keep it so consistent. So a lot of times we keep up with old traditional methods that we've all learned from from our family. But at the same time, too, there's some new technology that's made us even better. And one of the good things is we've been very open-minded technology, and and some of the technology we we we we didn't feel that it was worth it, but that this is is definitely a great thing. And I think my dad would be really proud at how we really have zeroed in on incredible fermentation, and everybody wins.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

100%. And look, great tobacco, like you taught me, always starts at the seed. Absolutely. We'll get into that, especially as we start going into our growing season later on in the year. And we and I think this is really fun. I loved going down to Nicaragua, you know, for of course, for you know, just working on future projects, stuff that we have coming out in 27, 28, and even 29. And I think there's a project coming out for 2032 as well. So we continue to work on, and we're doing it for you, our consumers, and our retailers, our loyal and faithful retailers as well. But I think it's you know, it's again, great tobacco starts at the seed, but fermentation, and when you when you do everything right, fermentation just brings the best out of the tobaccos. It really does, and it makes the tobaccos that that refinement, the balance, the aroma, and really the biggest key word is the consistency. And and I appreciate all the compliments, and I know my dad does as well, of the compliments of consistency that we're well known for in Perdomo Cigars. I think today we just showed you guys one of the biggest reasons why we're so consistent. When you look at the organization, the methods that we use to properly ferment all our tobaccos. I'm just so glad that you guys were able to see that. And Dad, I I think it's time to thank everybody for joining

Subscribe Comment And Follow Along

SPEAKER_02 17:28

us today. And if you like it, please subscribe. Also leave some comments.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Leave some comments for us and Yeah, we we actually read them and we're the ones who actually answer every one of them. Look, we feel that if you take the time out to comment and give us your input, we should have the right time too. You know, we have some knuckleheads out there that come up and say some stupid stuff. For the most part, though, everybody's been really phenomenal. And I want to thank all of you that are letting spreading the word. We've gotten a tremendous amount of down hits.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

Well, I love the knuckleheads too, because they help the algorithm. So the more you guys comment, even if it's good, bad, or indifferent, whatever it is, we'll we'll also comment to you guys too on your stupidity. But it's okay. But we appreciate all the great comments that you guys have given us, and we're gonna continue to answer you guys too. But also follow us on Facebook on Perdomo Cigars, also our Perdomo Cigars Instagram page. Follow us at NickPerdomo Jr. on Instagram, NicholasPerdomo the third on Instagram, also on our Facebook pages, of course, as well. But again, please leave us the comments. We love you guys, and we look forward to commenting and talking with you guys more and more. So thanks so much. We'll see you next time. See ya. That was good.