An Interview (and Blind Cigar Tasting) With Kellen Gorbett - Founder of Standard & Twain!

Join us for our latest podcast where we speak with Kellen Gorbett, an Angels' Cup subscriber who was inspired to start his own blind cigar tasting club. Standard & Twain is a blind cigar tasting club where subscribers receive two cigars with the wrapper removed, a set of tasting note cards to record your notes, and a card to reveal the details on each cigar. As soon as I heard about this service, I signed up, and in this episode Kellen will be waking me through a tasting of two of the cigars I’ve received so far. Our favorite quotes include:

It will be interesting to talk about the differences in cigars and coffee. In the way they’re tasted, in the way the whole process from seed to the when you’re actually smoking or drinking. Because cigars hopefully you’ll be able to pinpoint some flavor in there. And then with this cigar in particular, hopefully it will change a little bit and that’s complexity with a cigar. Sometime it will start creamy and pick up spices as you go. Sometimes the opposite.

You have the wine spectrum of flavors, you have the coffee spectrum of flavors which is massive. Cigars are probably going to be a little more limited. It’s going to be more on the brown and green and yellow spectrum. Occasionally you’ll get maybe like a cherry, something like that.

One of my best friends is a roaster in Dublin and when he smokes cigars he sends me the most amazing description of the flavors he’s getting. I think the coffee industry is next level in the intricacy and palate.

It started because a bunch of my friends, several years ago, would get together. This was after college and we had gone our own ways. And around Christmas time we’d get back together and cigars are such a cool thing. For example I’ll smoke a cigar with a friend on the back porch at night and the lights will be off, and his wife will walk out there. And we’ll just be sitting out there in the dark with these cigars. And in any other scenario she’d be like “what are you guys doing out here”. But we have a cigar so it’s perfectly normal.

We sit around, we catch up, talk about life, and have a cigar. But we wanted to take it to the next level. So we’d have everyone go to a cigar store, find the most unique cigar you can find, remove the label, set them all out on the table, and select which cigar you want. Then you smoke it and whoever bought the cigar tells you what it was and you learn all about it. And that’s kind of how Standard & Twain evolved, because you would learn more about cigars that night more than we would smoking cigars throughout the year. So I thought why don’t we do this all the time and make it something other people can do.

Big thanks to Kellen. I had a ton of fun doing the cigar tasting, and I’m sure you would too. Conveniently, Kellen has offered a totally free box and a cigar cutter to listeners of this podcast. Use coupon code "FIRSTBOXFREE" at standardandtwain.com to receive your first shipment totally free. That’s a killer deal, but it expires October 1st so act fast!