Ave Maria Dark Knight Review

Preface: I’ve never actually written a cigar review, sure I’ve smoked a ton of cigars and given feedback but I’ve never tried to document the full thing. I say that to say please bear with me on these first few reviews, I’m still working out my process.

There’s liquor store near my house that has a small walk in humidor, do to it’s location <5 mins from my house I will drop in there and see what they have while I’m out and about.Recently I was in there and box caught my eye, it was a box containing ten black individual coffin boxes (a small wooden box containing a single cigar). The coffins looked nice, small black boxes with the words “Dark Knight” printed vertically in a nice bold silver, a small red band around the top or bottom depending on how you looked at it said “Ave Maria Dark Knight” in gold and silver. The visual presentation was definitely eye catching, I figured “what the hell, let’s’ go” and picked up a couple. Retail on these was $10.99 which at this point isn’t a crazy price for a premium cigar.  Full transparency I had always thought that Ave Maria was basically an online exclusive brand, I’d always seen them in the CI catalog, so I was surprised to find them at this B&M.  Also I wasn’t too up on Ave Maria, at the time of purchase I really didn’t know much about the company or more specifically anything about the Dark Knight.

Opening the coffin also had a nice surprise, in the past I’ve seen coffins that just slide open on you basically dump the cigar out, the Dark Knight box opens vertically and gently lifts the cigar up making it super easy to remove. If you can’t tell I’m a sucker for clever gimmicky packaging. Enough talk about the box, let’s get into the actual cigar.

Ave Maria Dark Knight

Blend –

Wrapper: Nicaraguan Maduro
Binder: Nicaraguan
Filler: Nicaraguan
Size: 5.2×54 Box Pressed Robusto

  Pre-Cut

The foot on the Ave Maria told me a lot about what the cigar had in store. Smelling the foot I got what reminded me of walking into a BBQ restaurant, it was smoky with a hint of spice and a bit of what I would maybe call hay.

I used my Xikar and went with a standard straight cut, the cut felt nice and looked good. The dry draw opened up with pepper, and a smokey barnyard note, again this may be closer to hay but reminded me of walking into the horse barn on may families farm it’s a note I quite enjoy. The draw was nice, not too tight at all I was happy with the cut and the draw and left it alone.

First Third

Right off the light I get pepper and a touch of chocolate. The room note is slightly sweet like baking chocolate. There’s a lot going on here but for me it’s checking all the boxes; spicy, smokey, sweet. At this point I started reading the marketing info and when I learned that this was an A.J. Fernandez cigar it all

started to make sense. The retrohale was lightly chocolatey and a nice hit of pepper, the pepper was much more pronounced here. The first third was starting to reminded me of  Mexican hot chocolate. It was rich, slightly sweet, and spicy. The room note (while I was outside I was able to catch it) was slightly sweet and reminded me of baking chocolate, I really enjoyed the room note of this cigar.

Second Third

The opening was extremely nice, moving into the second third of the cigar the spice (pepper) settles a bit but that is by no means to say it’s not there anymore but just settles in. The chocolate starts to ramp up a bit and adds a creaminess as well as a nutty note maybe almond. The Dark Knight now comes across as a chocolate bar with almonds and it’s definitely delicious. There’s fair volume of smoke that comes off with each puff, the Dark Knight lets you know you’re smoking a cigar. It’s at this point that I realize that I’m enjoying the cigar too much and have forgotten to get pics along the way. Strength is Medium+ may be better to just call it Full, this cigar is no joke and I’m very happy that I had dinner before starting this review, otherwise things could have gotten a bit out of hand. Body is also hitting full, there’s a lot of complexity here. I had a a handful of flavors that would come and go cinnamon, cedar, and leather come to mind they would show up say hello and then fall away. The burn was good, I did have to touch it up once or twice but those were through no fault of the cigar as I was outside with a bit of wind.

Last Third

The last third see’s the chocolate mellow just a touch and brings in some earthiness. I ended up smoking this down to a nub, I hated for it to end. The nicotine really comes on in the last third even after a full dinner I could feel it starting to hit me.

TLDR;

The Ave Maria Dark Knight is A.J. Fernandez through and through, if you like Spicy, sweet, complex cigars with a healthy dose of vitamin N the Ave Maria Dark Knight may be for you. I thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of the cigar, save for the strength as I’ve gotten older I tend to not enjoy the full strength sticks as much. Retail on this as I said above was $10.99 and I would probably pay that again for it, at that price I would say if you know that you like A.J. Fernandez blends it’s worth it, if you can find these under $10 it’s a no brainer. If you are a cigar newbie be aware that this is a full strength cigar and plan accordingly (eat a hearty meal before hand or have a Hershey bar handy for when your stomach starts turning).

Closing

We at the Cigar Match Podcast need to come up with a scoring system for these reviews, for now I’ll just go with a 1-10 score. For me this was probably 6.5 – 7 it wasn’t amazing but it was definitely enjoyable and I would recommend it. Side note I didn’t factor price into that score, that’ solely based on the smoking experience.