Black Label Trading Co.

Black Label Trading is as much a house of artists as of tobacco. James and Angela Brown founded it in Nicaragua in 2013, and James draws every band himself.

In 2015, two years after they began, they opened their own factory in Estelí: Fábrica Oveja Negra — the black sheep. It is designed to look like an artist's studio rather than a production line, and that is not an advertising line: the choice shows in the scale and in the pace.

Everything is rolled by hand. The leaves come from Nicaragua, Honduras, San Andrés in Mexico and Ecuador.

The range names form a sustained register: Last Rites, Bishops Blend, Benediction, Santa Muerte, Salvation, Deliverance, Royalty. It is a funerary and liturgical iconography, carried through to the last line of the drawing — and it is what marks this house out long before anything has been lit.

Range Depth

• Last Rites

  Wrapper Oveja Negra blend · Strength Full

  "The last rites" — the founding range, and the one that set the tone for the whole of the house's iconography. Full-bodied, rolled at Oveja Negra.

  Robusto · Toro · Petit Lancero

• Salvation

  Wrapper Oveja Negra blend · Strength Medium-Full

  The counterpart to Last Rites, in the same liturgical register. Leaves from Nicaragua, Honduras, San Andrés and Ecuador.

  Robusto · Toro

• Santa Muerte

  Wrapper Oveja Negra blend · Strength Full

  The Holy Death of Mexican popular devotion, drawn by James Brown himself. The house carries its imagery through rather than merely hinting at it.

  Robusto · Toro

• Black Works Studio

  Wrapper Ecuadorian Habano · Strength Full

  James Brown's second name, November 2015, same factory — Oveja Negra — for the less orthodox blends. NBK, Killer Bee and Rorschach opened.