Artesano del Tabaco is a company formed by Billy and Gus Fakih, two of the three brothers who owned and ran the two Cigar Inn stores on the east side of Manhattan. (Bass Fakih is not involved in Artesano del Tabaco.) The brand has been in the works for the past three years, as the brothers began working with Fernandez not long after selling their stores to Britain’s Imperial Tobacco PLC (known today as Imperial Group PLC) in June 2015 for undisclosed terms. The stores were renamed Casa de Montecristo after the acquisition.
The cigars are entirely Nicaraguan, made with a variety of Nicaraguan leaves including a wrapper grown by Fernandez himself, who is a tobacco farmer as well as a cigarmaker.
