PDR Launching AFR-75 Claro, Updates to Maduro Line
Next week, PDR Cigars will introduce a new line that wears a lighter shade of Mexican San Andrés wrapper at the International Premium Cigar and Pipe Retailers trade show in Las Vegas. Called AFR-75 Claro, the brand is the follow-up project to the AFR-75 Maduro, a dark, big ring gauge cigar named for brand owner Abe Flores' initials (Abraham Flores Rosario) and his birth year of 1975.
"Creating [the AFR-75 Maduro] has always been such a passion for me. It was a cigar that I only let my four best torcedors roll," Flores said. "Now after working with this dark, beautiful wrapper for the last couple of years, I started noticing color variations in the processing of this tobacco...I call it Claro but really it's a lot more than that."
Flores has taken the lighter colored Mexican wrappers and draped them around a Nicaraguan Criollo ‘98 binder and fillers from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and the United States (Connecticut broadleaf). AFR-75 Claro will launch in four sizes: Catador, at 4 inches by 54 ring ($13.75); Sublime, 5 by 56 ($14.75); Edmundo, 6 by 58 ($15.75); and Immenso, 7 by 60 ($16.75). The cigars will ship in white, 24-count boxes printed with a black checkerboard pattern.
The original AFR-75 Maduro line will be getting some updates as well. The Catador vitola will be joining the Maduro lineup. With the addition of Catador, the Maduro line now totals four vitolas. The packaging of the Maduro line has also been updated, the lids of the black boxes now wear a white checkerboard pattern; an inversed, mirror image, of the AFR-75 Claro packaging.
AFR-75 Claro and the new AFR-75 Maduro vitola and packaging updates will start shipping to retailers in late August or early September, after the IPCPR trade show. They are made at the PDR Cigars Factory in the Dominican Republic.
