Kafie 1901

Kafie 1901 is a Honduran brand by name and a Dominican one by place, and this atlas classifies it by the second. The number is the year the Kafie family settled in Tegucigalpa. Gaby Kafie himself was a surgeon — foot and ankle orthopaedics, sports medicine — until a rare eye disease forced him to retire in 2007, at thirty-eight. Cigars are what he did next.

The company was born in 2013, in Florida, and had its cigars rolled at Puros Aliados, the Reyes family's factory in Danlí, whose entry this atlas carries. In 2017, Kafie opened his own, in the same town: Tabacalera G. Kafie y Cía, two thousand square feet, twenty people including twelve rollers, two master blenders, a leaf buyer and a fermentation manager, for a hundred and fifty thousand cigars a year split among four blends — Don Fernando Maduro, Connecticut, Sumatra, San Andrés.

It lasted four years. In November 2021, the hurricanes that had ravaged the region and the supply chain broken by the pandemic got the better of it: Kafie closed Danlí and moved all his production to La Aurora, the oldest factory in the Dominican Republic, whose entry this atlas also carries. The first cigar of this new life, the Serie L Natural, is an all-Dominican blend composed with Manuel Inoa, La Aurora's master blender; the L is the Roman numeral of Kafie's fiftieth birthday, in July 2021, and the cigar arrived more than a year late, in September 2022.

A house that had its factory and lost it is the reverse of the boutique scene's usual trajectory. This entry says so as it is.

Range Depth

• Serie L Natural

  Wrapper Dominican · Strength Medium

  The first cigar of the Dominican life, composed with La Aurora's Manuel Inoa. All Dominican. The L for Kafie's fifty years.

• Don Fernando Maduro

  Wrapper Maduro · Strength Full

  One of the four blends of the Danlí years.