Asylum Signature Series Robusto (5×50)

The story behind the Asylum Signature Series is one of the better origin stories in recent cigar history. Tom Lazuka was deep in the blending process for the Sensorium when one particular blend kept landing just short of the top spot. Not because it was wrong. Because something else was right by a hair. Lazuka pulled that runner-up blend, started smoking it himself, and handed it out personally for years while he waited on enough Colombian tobacco to build it at scale.

The Robusto is the entry point into that blend at 5×50, a 45-minute smoke that Christian Eiroa rolled out of the CLE factory in Honduras once the inventory finally came together. What Lazuka has described as tasting like nothing else you have tried before is a maduro profile that earns the claim: the Colombian component brings something genuinely different to the construction, a complexity that sits underneath the dark wrapper character and reveals itself slowly through a burn that is consistent and deliberate from first third to finish. Sixteen dollars. Ten to a box. This is what Tom Lazuka smokes when he is not handing out cigars at an event. That is a pretty solid endorsement.