An unranked editorial retrospective of lines available by 2024, informed by manufacturer accounts. These selections are not historical award results or firsthand tasting notes from cigars produced that year.
Padrón’s sixtieth anniversary takes a visible form in a shaped cigar, connecting six decades of company history to the skill of the roller. Blackened S84 and Encore Black move familiar families in other directions through their wrappers and blends. Our picks for the best cigars of 2024 place those developments beside recent anniversary and harvest expressions. The year invites a close look at what a new release actually changes, from the leaf around a cigar to its contours in the hand.
Padrón 60th Anniversary
Introduced in 2024, Padrón 60th Anniversary marks six decades since the company’s 1964 beginning. Its shaped presentation turns the milestone into a visible exercise in craftsmanship. The family’s anniversary tradition gains another form here, with the roller’s work giving a long history something immediate and tangible.
Blackened S84 Shade to Black
Drew Estate announced S84 Shade to Black in 2024 as a Connecticut-wrapper expression of the collaboration behind M81. The new outer-leaf direction gives Blackened another way to develop its original idea. A familiar group of collaborators remains behind the name, while the particular cigar begins a separate chapter.
E.P. Carrillo Encore Black
Encore Black combines Connecticut Broadleaf maduro wrapper, Mexican binder and Nicaraguan filler. The recipe takes a clear departure from the original Encore’s all-Nicaraguan tobacco composition. E.P. Carrillo extends the family through a different set of materials, making the added word on the band stand for a substantive blend change.
Perdomo 30th Anniversary Maduro
Perdomo’s thirtieth-anniversary Maduro emphasizes long-aged Nicaraguan tobacco and barrel treatment of the wrapper. The preparation gives the commemoration a different focus from Padrón’s shaped presentation. Its place in the anniversary family stays tied to this specific wrapper expression and the work devoted to preparing it.
La Aurora 120 Aniversario
The regular 120 Aniversario line carries La Aurora’s Dominican tobacco expression into the year after its 2023 introduction. The occasion reaches across one hundred twenty years of company history. Beside Padrón and Perdomo, it reveals three makers translating very different lengths of experience into separate anniversary cigars.
Plasencia Cosecha 151
Cosecha 151 gives the year an all-Honduran expression organized around Plasencia’s harvest sequence. Its number records an agricultural designation, bringing another measure of time beside the company anniversaries. The growing family’s history is present through the crop and the line developed from that tobacco story.
Undercrown 10
Undercrown 10 celebrates a decade of a cigar line. The standard anniversary blend combines Mexican wrapper, Connecticut Broadleaf binder and Nicaraguan filler, giving Drew Estate’s factory-centered family another composition. The milestone belongs to the line’s development, adding a different scale of history to this year’s company celebrations.
Rocky Patel Sixty
Rocky Patel’s Sixty turns a personal birthday into a cigar with Mexican San Andrés wrapper over Nicaraguan binder and filler. Additional aging after rolling gives the maker’s account another time-related detail. The number matches Padrón’s anniversary, but the occasion is intimate: an individual’s birthday carried into a particular blend.
Fonseca by My Father
Fonseca by My Father continues the Garcia family’s Nicaraguan expression introduced in 2020. The historic name now carries a distinct manufacturing chapter, with the My Father designation locating the cigar within that lineage. It gives the year another relationship with the past, expressed through a brand’s renewal under a new making family.
Plasencia Alma Fuerte
The original dark-wrapper Alma Fuerte brings Plasencia’s Nicaraguan expression back into view. Its connection to the family’s growing experience provides continuity amid the year’s newer wrapper and anniversary developments. The cigar holds a clear place in that range, giving the agricultural background behind the family name a finished, recognizable form.
Looking back at 2024
A new name or anniversary matters most when the cigar gives it substance. In 2024, that substance appears in a shaped Padrón, another Blackened wrapper and a changed Encore recipe. The year’s selections reveal how an established story can continue through concrete acts of making.
Brand background, where linked, lives on Ashologist™ — The Study of Cigars.