Suerdieck

The tobacco of Bahia, grown in the Recôncavo around Cruz das Almas, sustained for more than a century a cigar industry that exported to Europe long before Central America came to dominate the market. Suerdieck was its best-known house — and it no longer exists.

August Suerdieck, a German, arrived in Bahia in 1888 as an employee of a Hamburg firm, charged with overseeing the baling of tobacco. Four years later he bought his employer's warehouse and founded his own house. Cigar making followed, at Maragogipe and then at Cruz das Almas, and Suerdieck became the country's leading producer.

Its tobacco — mata fina, dark, sweet, with a particular acidity — has no equivalent anywhere. It is a taste that smokers used to Cuban profiles often find disconcerting at the first puff: fruitier, almost wine-like, with a fast burn that calls for a slower draw.

In 2000, after a hundred and eight years, the house closed its last factory. The atlas keeps it for what it represents: the memory of a producing country that the geography of the premium cigar pushed to the margins — and, this time, erased.

Range Depth

• Suerdieck Mata Fina

  Wrapper Mata Fina · Strength Medium

  The tobacco of Bahia in its most direct form: fruity, almost wine-like, with an acidity no other terroir gives. To be looked for among collectors — production stopped in 2000.

  Corona

• Suerdieck Brasilia

  Wrapper Mata Fina Claro · Strength Light

  A short format and a light register, in the tradition of the small Brazilian cigars Europe imported in quantity last century. This one is no longer made either.

  Petit Corona

🥃 Pairings

• Aged cachaça

  Spirits

  A pairing of country, and of register: the green note of the cane answers the fruit of the mata fina.

• Brazilian coffee

  Coffee

  Mild and chocolatey, it tempers the acidity of the leaf.