Epic Cigars

Epic was born of a Canadian police officer turned real-estate agent in the Caribbean. Dean Parsons left ten years of law enforcement in 2005 for the Turks and Caicos Islands, where good cigars were hard to find; he went to buy them in the Dominican Republic as gifts for his clients, met small factories there, and launched a first brand reserved for the islands, Turks Select, from 2006 to 2010. Settled in Santiago in 2009, he founded Epic in 2010 with two cigars, a Maduro and a Corojo, which are still in the catalogue.

The factory is the one that rolls Kristoff, whose entry this atlas carries: Charles Fairmorn, in Santiago, now Tabacalera von Eicken. The Corojo Reserva wears an Ecuadorian corojo wrapper, the Maduro Reserva a Brazilian Arapiraca. In late 2019, Zander-Greg, the California distributor that has owned Nat Cicco since 2007, bought Epic and kept Parsons at its head — he says little has changed for him, other than volumes and markets.

A brand founded by a foreigner, rolled by a named factory, bought by a distributor: three things this atlas writes as they are, without translating them into romance.

Range Depth

• Corojo Reserva

  Wrapper Ecuadorian corojo · Strength Medium-Full

  One of the two cigars of 2010, still in the catalogue.

• Maduro Reserva

  Wrapper Brazilian Arapiraca · Strength Full

  The other cigar of 2010.