Hey folks! I was recently discussing samplers with someone and they brought up a great question. Why do we offer samplers with multiples of the same cigar in different sizes? After all, isn’t one of the benefits of buying a sampler to try multiple cigars?

It’s a great question because the answer may surprise the newer cigar enthusiasts among us: each size will offer a slightly different (or sometimes very different) experience. In essence, each size offers a new perspective on the blend, almost like a color palette that offers several shades to choose from.

Veterans to the hobby will often try each vitola (read: size) in a new blend before committing to a favorite to purchase a box or boxes of for their humidors. Line samplers, or samplers with various sizes/shapes of a blend, helps us find the vitola that speaks to us the most.

For instance, my favorite vitola of Caldwell’s Long Live the King is the lancero named My Style is Jalapeño. Generally, I don’t reach for a lancero in a new blend – but my favorite aspects of this blend are amplified in this format.

Another example is Steve Saka’s debut Sobremesa. In this scenario, Saka speficically blended the larger ring gauges to smoke differently than the smaller ring gauges, but my absolute favorite is the Short Churchill size. And we can’t forget Casdagli: each and every one of their blends are tweaked so that each size can be radically different than the others. Most of their blends have their own personality according to their size, but some don’t even bear a resemblance to the other sizes in the lineup.

We talked more about cigar sizes and how the combustion, surface volume, and length affect a cigar’s performance and taste here if you’d like to read more about it. The best advice, however, always boils down to trying multiple sizes in a new blend before committing to a box purchase. This is easier said than done on limited editions and rare finds, but an open mind is a happy one in the long run.