003: When Hobbies and Cigars Collide: Coffee, Woodworking & Running
Episode 3: Coffee, Woodworking, and Why Size Matters In Episode 3 of Cigars for the Common Man, Donny and Mark are back in The Shed with a couple of cigars and a lot on their minds. Three episodes in and still not launched, they've given themselves a buffer for exactly the reason you'd expect: life happens. The episode introduces a new recurring segment called Good, Bad, or Indifferent, a casual rundown of what they've been smoking lately and what stood out. Along the way, they land on a reminder worth repeating: don't judge a cigar on one experience, and some reviewers won't rate one until they've smoked three. Mark then digs into something he's been thinking about for a few weeks: how the same tobacco blend can taste and smoke completely differently depending on the size it's rolled into. He breaks down the four mechanical factors behind it: wrapper-to-filler ratio, burn temperature and concentration, draw and smoke density, and how length affects the flavor journey across a cigar's thirds. He also clears up the difference between body and strength, two terms that often get confused. To make it stick, he maps common vitolas onto coffee brewing methods: Donny takes the second main segment and draws a parallel between the craftsmanship behind a premium cigar and building handcrafted furniture. He's currently working on a commissioned dining table made from live oak trees felled on a client's property, and walks through the full process from timber to finished piece- air drying, kiln time, milling, forming, and finishing- to show just how many steps and how much patience it takes to get from raw material to something refined. The connection to how a cigar is made, with hundreds of hands touching it from harvest to the finished roll, lands naturally. The episode closes with a segment on a frankly ridiculous idea the two of them have been kicking around: smoking a cigar during a local 5K. They're not entirely joking. If you're in the Winston-Salem area and this sounds like your kind of bad idea, they want to hear from you. Find Mark on Instagram at @CigarsWithMark and Donny at @todays_cigar. Follow the show at @CigarsfortheCommonMan.
