La Palina Pasha

Today's review is of the La Palina Pasha. La Palina contacted me a few weeks ago and asked If I would be interested in trying a few of their cigars, which is where I procured this cigar. I had heard a few things about this brand before, but not much. When the original creator of the brand, Samuel Paley, retired in 1926 he retired La Palina as well. Bill Paley (Samuel's grandson) brought the brand back to life and is having them made at the Graycliff factory. Bill worked with Avelino Lara at the Graycliff factory to come up with this blend. Avelino ( who later fled to Nassau and ended up at Graycliff)  was the blender who came up with the original Cohiba blend in Cuba. There are two lines in the La Palina brand, this one coming from the Family Series. The Pasha is named after Bill's dad, William S Paley, the founder and chairman of CBS. Pasha was Williams family knickname. This cigar measures in at 7.25x50 and features a Costa Rican wrapper, Costa Rican binder and Honduran and Nicarguan filler. This is an eye catching cigar, with close to a one inch shaggy foot. This is a true shaggy foot, with the binder and filler extending quite a bit out from the wrapper. 

The Pasha has a smooth and oily wrapper with a softer feel to it overall. This softer feel seems to be something very common with cigars out of the Graycliff factory. After clipping the cap I noticed the Cuban style dimple in the head. This is hard to describe, but it's pretty much like an inside out pigtail cap that makes a dimple in the top of the filler tobacco. The prelight draw shows a nice draw with light hay and some sweeter flavors. I decided not to cut off the shaggy foot and to just light it up and see what happens. I don't recommend this if you are smoking somewhere that you need to keep clean. It didn't light very evenly and I didn't get a ton of smoke through it until I burned through the shaggy foot and the wrapper started adding flavor to the blend. Once the wrapper got going, the smoke got really creamy with flavors of oak and a syrupy cinnamon sweetness. This is starting out nice and mild strengthwise and I would say medium in flavor and body. The burn is pretty even and the ash holds on strong. 

At the halfway point things are pretty much how they started, creamy and sweet with the oak flavor balancing out the cinnamon sugar sweetness. This has something unique about it that I can't quite nail down. This isn't one of those cigars that I can pull out a ton of individual flavors on. What is has though is a very balanced flavor profile that never gets boring. During the final third of the Pasha, some nuttyness has joined the flavor profile, as well as just a hint of some floral flavors on the finish. 

The La Palina Pasha offered a very pleasant smoking experience. This is a mild strength cigar with a tasty and unique flavor profile. This is not the style of cigar I normally smoke and I found it to be a nice change of pace. Here is the tough part, the MSRP for the Pasha is $23. I am not really going to go into whether or not this is worth $23 bucks, because that is going to vary person to person. What I will say is that I did enjoy this cigar but $23 is a hard price for me to pay for any cigar. This one needs to be looked at as more of a special occasion smoke. I see people frequently dropping that price on a Davidoff, and to me I would rather smoke this Pasha (but then again I am not a big fan of Davidoffs in general).