Paper Binder?

[TheSilentChamber]

Like what kind of paper? Maby one of the rollers was reading a book and ran out of tobacco.

[Island Epicurean]

I have smoked all sorts of Cigars, both Expensive and Cheap..... Hell, when i worked in a remote location up north all I could get were Swisher Sweets...... But I have never seen Paper in a Cigar...... I have heard that 95% of all Americal 100 dollar bills have trace amounts of Cocaine on them, but never a cigar with a piece of an american bill in it....... (Yeah, and if it is a Davidoff it is probably part of a $1000 dollar bill..... And even then you are being cheated.)

Anyway, if you can get a pic of the paper, put it on here. I would really like to see it.

Happy Smoking... (Both Tobacco and Paper )

[Neuromancer]

If the paper was brown it probably wasn't paper, but HTL...homogenized tobacco leaf...mashed up like pulp, just like papaer and rolled the same way...used to make binder for cheap cigars...

[SuperChuck]

My girlfriend told me she once took apart a gas station cigar and found a big chunk of a supermarket plastic bag inside... Good thing she wasn't using it to smoke tobacco! :)

[mglantz]

The horrible truth, Baron, is that if it looked like a paper binder, it probably was. I learned this when I was working in the industry many years ago. Homogenized tobacco leaf (HTL) is routinely used in the commercial or machine made industry as a wrapper. The largest users of this wrapper are Altadis and Swedish Match. This wrapper allows them to turn out incredible numbers of cigars on automated machines. However, there are some companies that turn out cheap, machine made cigars that go one step further and actually use paper as a binder. The paper used is not that different from what we call butcher paper, although usually thinner. It burns at the same rate as the short filler usually used in these smokes and allows the manufacturer to work with a lower overhead. The paper also burns easier than tobacco so the cigars stays lit, not unlike all the crap they put in cigarettes to enhance their burn. The paper has little taste so it doesn't interfere with the filler, however, the tobaccos in these smokes are usually so bad that the binder could be made out of cow patties and you wouldn't be able to tell.

The paper binders seem to be less prevalant today than they used to be. Maybe it's due to better and cheaper machine manufacturering techniques that utilize real tobacco or maybe it's just that there used to be so many more firms that produced cheap cigars. Whatever the reason, they do exist. The problem is, unless you dissect a smoke from each cheapie brand, you'll never know whether you're smoking a cigar or a notebook. Hope this helps.