JM's Dominican handmade corona earns everyday cigar vote

In my continuing search for great inexpensive cigars, I ran across the JM brand in my most frequently visited party store. I know, I know, I always say to NEVER buy a cigar from someplace that also sells porn and Tiparillos, but I mentored the store owners and at least knew that they were attempting to properly humidify their stock.

They had a small humidor (perhaps 100 cigars) and had a small quantity of about four or five brands. One day, a couple of years back, I overpaid them for a Don Tomas out of desperation. It almost fell apart as soon as I removed it from the wrapper.

I immediately went back into the store and voiced my concern. One of the owners apologized profusely and said I could just take another cigar. No way. What would be the point of that? Unless you give me your entire stock and let me try to revive them to smokability, then I don't want another cigar out of this humidor in the condition that it and its contents are in.

So, I took a pint of vodka instead.

In the course of our conversation, I recommended some specific cigars that they might carry and suggested that they actually use the dried out humidification system they had in the in the humidor. I think they thought that you put a little water in it once and you're good for, say, two or three decades.

Over the course of the next couple of months we had many discussions and I even recommended where they might purchase some decent cigars that they could sell for a reasonable price and make a decent profit.

Last week, I stopped in the store and noticed that their humidor was decently stocked and the humidification system looked recently attended to.

One of the cigars they were offering was JM's Dominican Corona. Through the wrapper it looked like a decently constructed stick. The corona measures 5 1/2 by 42 and boasts a Sumatra shade wrapper with Cuban seed, long filler tobacco. Handmade in the Dominican Republic.

The party store was selling them for $2.99. Through intense interrogation, he told me how much he actually paid for them and I haggled him down to two bucks in return for all of my free consulting work.

Upon removing the cigar from its cellophane wrapper, I discovered that the cigar was already punched. Odd. Did someone lick it (like I do) before using a cigar punch on it? I'm going to look into to how and why they do this. I'll let you know if I find anything out.

Anyway, back to the smoke. I was slightly surprised by the smoothness of not only the cigar (medium bodied), but also the smoothness of the ash.

Unfortunately, because of the locations where I most often smoke cigars (car, garage, yard in mild wind), I don't get to test the ash to any recordable length. On this occasion however, I did have the get to let it grow to nearly an inch and was pleasantly surprised by its texture.

The strength maintained throughout without getting too bitter at the end and it has a bit of a creamy taste. Not pasty creamy, but pretty tasty creamy. The nostril sensation, when you allow your face to be enveloped in a cloud of smoke, was nicely stimulating.

These cigars can be found online for as little as $1.25 each in boxes of 50 making them a very suitable candidate for an everyday cigar.

My rating is 87. What does that mean? I dunno. But it sounded about right. :)