avantgrade purchased this cigar on 2010-02-02.
It has a little over a month of additional aging.
The cigar took 3 matches to light, which is on the higher end of what I'll go through to get a fresh stick started. The aroma is absolutely gorgeous, a combination of dark roasted coffee. There is a lot of promise for complexity from the first few puffs. As with the aroma, the smoke brings out tastes of dark coffee and bitter chocolate, but there are some nuances of brown sugar sweetness and hazelnut. So far, this is very interesting prelude to a smoke.
The draw is on the smoother side of medium, with just the right amount of effort required to puff. The smoke billows away from the stick in nice and healthy doses. As for the aroma, it gets even more beautiful than with the initial light. Dark chocolate and coffee intertwine, with lots of black pepper coming through. There is an ever so slight sweetness still coming through, but it becomes replaced with a creamier note of hazelnut. The ash is holding strong, patterned with gray and white. The body is nice and strong, and I would rate it right on medium-to-full.
There is one problem though: the burn. By the end of the first 1/3, I had to relight about 3 times. One edge of the stick (consistently the same edge, to be exact), had trouble catching up with the rest of the burn line.
The cigar drops a couple of notches in body. There is a distinct creaminess that is felt once in two or three puffs. The bold black pepper that was very dominant on the first 1/3 is wearing down, but is by no means gone. It tends to appear whenever you think that the cigar became creamy, like a maduro. Whenever you get comfortable, the black pepper comes back and reminds you that this is not a weak cigar!
To go along with my previous note on the burn issue, the burn keeps getting worse. I am almost out of a full box of matches at this point. However, there seems to be so much potential to the cigar that I refuse to quit.
After working through the burn issues, the cigar finally achieves a sharp burn, and no touch-ups are needed. The body has returned back to the medium-full domain, and the dark roasted coffee flavors now welcome something new: I could best describe it as a dark rye bread, with a little toasted barley. It is truly an interesting taste, something I never experienced or expected in a cigar. Interestingly enough, some of the tobacco oils pooled into a droplet on the wrapper! This cigar is full of them. No wonder there is so much flavor.
In the end, I do feel like these cigars definitely could use some aging. Maybe they are still a bit too green to be enjoyed to their fullest. While I have to give quite a low score for the burn, and a little markdown on flavor (due to some over-pronounced notes of pepper), I am sure that these AB Medalist Belicosos have a lot of future potential. Those beautiful oils need some time to settle, and the flavors will surely smooth out, along with the pesky burn issues.
If you come across this cigar, I would highly recommend picking some up and stashing them away for a good while. Famous-Smoke.com sells them for $29.99 per box of 10. If you have a revolution card, its another $5.00 off, and sometimes they appear on the Monster. I picked a box up for $20.00 and free shipping. Anyway you look at it, it's a steal.