Room 101 San Andres 615
📌 Brand: Room101
📌 Line: San Andres
📌 Size: 615 – Churchill (7" × 48)
📌 Weight: 17 g
📌 Age: 13 years
📌 Origin: Honduras
Tasting Notes
Dark Chocolate – Rich but rarely develops beyond the core note
Earth – Heavy and persistent throughout
Cedar – Dry woody character in the background
Black Pepper – Moderate spice with occasional sharper moments
First Impressions
The Room101 San Andres 615 is an old-school Room101 release, using a Mexican San Andrés wrapper over a Honduran Corojo binder with Criollo and Corojo tobaccos in the filler. The 615 is the long 7 × 48 vitola of the original line. Pre-light aromas suggest dark chocolate, earth, cedar, and some sweetness, giving me hope for a rich and evolving smoke. Unfortunately, what follows never really delivers on that promise.
Smoking Experience
First Third – Opens with dark chocolate, earth, cedar, and black pepper. Initially there's enough richness to make the profile interesting, but it quickly settles into the same combination without much movement. The cigar also struggles to stay lit, requiring an early relight.
Second Third – Chocolate and earth continue to dominate, but there is almost no meaningful transition. The cigar becomes extremely one-dimensional, with draw after draw delivering essentially the same flavours. Worse, combustion continues to be a problem and multiple relights are needed.
Final Third – By this point the experience becomes frustrating. Earth, dark cocoa, and charred wood remain, but repeated relights begin introducing harsher burnt flavours. Rather than waiting to see what develops next, I'm simply trying to keep the cigar burning.
Pairings
Alcohol – Mount Gay 1703 Master Select Rum - Rich caramel, dried fruit, spice, and mature oak bring some much-needed sweetness and complexity alongside the cigar's heavy earthy profile.
Tea – Aged Shou Mei White Tea - Its mellow sweetness, dried-fruit character, and soft woody notes provide contrast without fighting the San Andrés wrapper.
Music Pairing
“Super Stupid” – Funkadelic
Raw, heavy, and packed with personality, providing some of the energy the cigar itself is missing.
Final Thoughts
This Room101 San Andres 615 is a major disappointment. The combination of Mexican San Andrés, Corojo, and Criollo sounds promising, and there are occasional flashes of enjoyable dark chocolate, earth, and cedar. But those flashes never develop into anything meaningful. The cigar is far too one-dimensional, and the constant need for relights completely destroys the rhythm of the smoke. Interestingly, burn problems were also reported in period reviews of the original San Andres line, although those reviewers generally enjoyed the flavour profile considerably more than I did with this particular cigar.
Final Score: 2/10
Why not a 10?
The cigar was extremely one-dimensional with almost no meaningful flavour development, while the large number of relights made the experience frustrating from beginning to end.
Only cigars that deliver flawless draw, balance, flavour evolution, construction and satisfaction get a 10.