“Ask us about our Legal Cubans” says a sign on the door of B’n’B International Cigars, the newish tobacco retailer on the 7900 block of Germantown Avenue. Last week, we obliged them. 

Their story goes like this: The storied Cuban cigar became illegal in 1962 when the embargo with Cuba went into effect and has remained so ever since. That is until Paul Magier, a New Jersey-based tobacco merchant and owner of Puros de Armando Ramos cigars, found a loophole. This particular loophole was a warehouse.

The building had belonged to Murray Grossman, a late cigar manufacturer who died decades earlier but the fate of whose estate was tied up in courts until 1985, when it was awarded it to his son Jeff. The real thing wasn’t the warehouse though, but its contents: the Tampa, Florida behemoth housed 46,000 pounds of Cuban cigar tobacco that was imported to the states by Murray in the late ‘50s. As in pre-embargo. As in legal.

Grossman’s son sat on the estate for awhile, until speculation the embargo might be lifted–a potentially devastating blow to the value of his holdings–spooked him into looking for a buyer for the largest, and possibly only, collection of legal Cuban tobacco in the country. He found Magier, whose Woodbridge-based Puros Cigars bought the tobacco and the warehouse for $2.5 million in 1999 and a year later started producing the Pinar Cigar line–legal Cuban cigars, 50 years post-embargo.

Which brings us back to Chestnut Hill.

“The flavor is hard to explain,” said Doc Coleman, a stentorian regular at B’n’B–”You can call me a cigar aficionado,” he instructed a reporter–as he alternately took pulls from a stogie in the lobby of the shop and struggled to explain to a novice what makes a Cuban a Cuban. “There’s a flavor of coffee, different berries, Connecticut leaf. It’s unique.”

And the Pinars, which sell at B’n’B for $18.75, are to his discriminating palette, most definitely Cuban.

“The flavor is different, but it’s within the range of what you expect from a Cuban,” said Coleman, whose voice sounds roughly the way cigars smell–rich, smoky, authoritative, masculine in the way of a bygone era, unhealthy. 

“It’s good stuff if you want to impress a connoisseur.” 

Or, evidently, a novice.