J.C. Newman

J.C. Newman is the oldest family cigar company still operating in the United States. Julius Caeser Newman, a Hungarian immigrant, rolled his first cigars in 1895 in his parents' barn in Cleveland. Four generations later, the family still holds the house — a unique case in an industry where almost every historic name has been bought up by a group.

In 1954 the company moved to Tampa, Florida, into a brick factory built in 1910 and topped by a clock: El Reloj. The building is the last great working cigar workshop in Ybor City, the district that in the early twentieth century produced several hundred million cigars a year and was then called the cigar capital of the world.

El Reloj houses today rolling machines from the 1930s, still in service, producing cigars by a process nobody else uses. The house has made that continuity its subject: it opens the factory to visitors and documents its machines as industrial heritage.

Its two top brands, Diamond Crown and Cuesta-Rey, come out of Tabacalera A. Fuente, in the Dominican Republic; each has its own entry in this atlas, filed there for that reason. But the family also rolls itself, and a first version of this entry said the opposite: since 2011 it has owned a factory in Estelí, PENSA — Puros de Estelí Nicaragua S.A. — opened with Quorum and El Baton, where Perla del Mar and then Brick House followed, and which rolls more than a hundred thousand cigars a day. Omar Ortez, whose Agrotabacos this atlas tells, co-runs it with Lázaro López. El Reloj, for its part, stays in Tampa.

Range Depth

• Brick House

  Wrapper Ecuadorian Habano · Strength Medium-Full

  A house name of the 1930s, revived. Rolled at PENSA, the family's factory in Estelí, where it was brought back from another factory.

• Perla del Mar

  Wrapper Ecuadorian Connecticut · Strength Medium

  The pearl of the sea — a PENSA line, added shortly after the 2011 opening.

• Quorum

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Mild-Medium

  One of the two cigars with which PENSA opened in 2011, with El Baton. The factory's volume cigar.

• Havana Q

  Wrapper Ecuadorian Havana seed · Strength Medium

  Presented in January 2021 by J.C. Newman as a cousin of Quorum, with larger gauges and in resealable bags of twenty, according to Cigar Coop. Wrapper of Havana-seed tobacco grown in Guayas, Ecuador, Nicaraguan binder and filler, strength medium according to the company, rolled at PENSA in Double Robusto 5 x 56, Double Toro 6 x 54, Double Churchill 7 x 52 and Double Grande 6 x 60.

• The American

  Wrapper Florida Sun Grown

  Brand which, according to the company, was the first rolled at El Reloj, when the factory opened in 1910, relaunched as a hand-rolled cigar in 2019 ahead of J.C. Newman's 125 years: Florida Sun Grown wrapper, Connecticut Broadleaf binder, Connecticut Havana filler with Pennsylvania Mennonite tobaccos. In October 2026, the retailer Corona Cigar sells a 250th edition, for the 250 years of American independence.

🥃 Pairings

• Kentucky bourbon

  Spirits

  The corn and vanilla of the bourbon with a Connecticut wrapper: the American pairing par excellence.

• Tampa Cuban coffee

  Coffee

  Ybor City invented it; nothing accompanies El Reloj more aptly.