So I was watching reruns of "Chopped" and "Iron Chef" on food network and I was thinking it might be a good idea for online store to do videos of new and up and coming rollers. Do a disqualification style event where stock tobacco is brought in from all over the world. Rollers who want to enter the contest get to come in on their own dime and have a set amount of time to rifle around the tobacco and produce their own cigar in a set format. Their hand rolled cigars would then be judged by a panel of judges.

This could of course be filmed, and could potentially be really wonderful entertainment for us cigar types. We get to meet new rollers and you could do an "American Idol" type thing where we can buy a bundle of the cigars of the top ten rollers and vote them onward or off depending on how we the customers like the cigars.

The winner would get to carry a line at the shop, and charge $5-$7.50 a stick. This idea would probabally work better with larger retailers like CI or Holts or maybe Famous.

And the line to vote a roller off if his cigars aren't up to snuff?

"Close but no cigar"
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I love this idea!

just need a vendor to sponsor the event and I see no reason why they wouldn't. Of course the "winning blend" would inevitably become the must-have cigar of the week, which would be good for business, good publicity, and some good excitement for the industry as a whole.
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I like the idea but the only problem would be the overall process of what it takes to have a winning blend. If everyone was given the same batch of tobacco all it would show was who could roll a better cigar, not who could make a better cigar. I remember a comment from a DPG event that was "You can teach a monkey to roll a cigar but you can't teach him how to blend it."
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The way I understood the original post, the idea was that the competitors would also be creating the blend from a variety of tobacco, not just rolling. not that it matters, since we're talking about a purely hypothetical idea.
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love it!
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Love the concept, I'd be watching it! :-) :-)
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Sounds like a good idea, but I doubt it would ever happen. Too many anti-Tobacco folks out there. You can have sex, murder, violence, drug use, etc. on screen, but anything thought to promote Tobacco would be a no no. I remember years ago, seeing Marlboro and Joe Camel Commercials. Also remember the Kodiak Bear commercials. Not anymore.... Also, remember several cartoon classics? Popeye for one, smoked a pipe. Remember a few episodes where Bugs Bunny had a Pipe or Cigar, Tom and Jerry, etc.......you never see that stuff anymore. The country is over run by anti this and that liberals. I'd love to watch a show like that, but don't see it happening.
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The idea of tobacco based show getting on TV sounds so remote, I hadn't even considered that something like this would actually be televised. still a cool idea though. It could still be done without televised sponsorship.
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Tobacco is such a huge part of American history...it's just sad to see the way people are just flushing it.
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While it does sound like a killer show to us cigar smokers, you gotta think, how many overall TV watchers would be interested in seeing something like that? While I like the idea, I don't really see it getting off the ground.
Scott
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It sounds interesting, but how many times can you watch someone roll a cigar and still be interested? I'd pry be willing to watch a handful of shows of this nature before I'd tune out.
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Yeah. but thats part of the beauty of the idea. The idea could be done in a "podcast" type format with videos and commentary and whatnot directly from the website.
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