“I firmly believe that this cigar is my greatest project yet,” says Dr. Gaby Kafie, founder of Kafie 1901 Cigars at the 2025 PCA Show in New Orleans. He is, of course, referring to the company’s newest cigar, Stiltsville, made at the La Aurora factory in the Dominican Republic.
The cigar takes its name from a colorful period in South Florida’s history when wooden structures sat atop stilts in the shallows of Biscayne Bay where a thriving, if somewhat nefarious, community grew up and where Kafie enjoyed fishing in its later years.
Collaborating with La Aurora’s master blender Manuel Inoa, Kafie produced a cigar that took three years to create. Stiltsville features a 5-year aged, triple-fermented dark Pennsylvania Broadleaf wrapper that shrouds a binder and filler tobaccos that were aged in 32-year-old white oak Kentucky barrels that once contained La Aurora’s award-winning rum. The tobaccos aged in those barrels for a year, developing a rich and robust smoking experience that builds in character, flavor and aroma to an epic and memorable finish.
Stiltsville will be released in the Fall of 2025 and will be available in two vitolas: Robusto (5 x 50; $16.99 per cigar) and Toro (5 ¾ x 54; $19.99 per cigar). An extremely limited production cigar, only 500 20-count boxes of each vitola have been produced for 2025.