Cigar Fillers - What's the Story?

Just what's inside that cigar you just smoked? Many times cigars as favors are handed out, and it would be nice to know something about them. Many cigars, especially some of the more premium brands, use very different grades of tobacco for the filler and the wrapper. "Long filler cigars" signify a much higher quality cigar, using exclusively long leaves of tobacco throughout the cigar. These type of cigars will also employ a third variety of tobacco leaf, a "binder", between the filler leaves and the outer wrapper. This enables expert cigar makers to use very delicate and attractive leaves as an outer wrapper. These are very nearly always blended varieties of cigar tobacco, and are among the most sought after cigars you can imagine. Many times each part of the cigar tobacco leaves will come from different countries.

In most cheap cigars, the filler consists of chopped up tobacco leavings, and it's not uncommon to find a bogus type of cigar "paper", made up entirely of tobacco pulp and used to bind the cigar together.