Finck Cigar Company: Alamo Sweet

In our anachronistic search for the Great American Cigar, we are going to leave the fecund shores of the Susquehanna River, traveling to the sunny Southwest, home of the Finck Cigar Company in San Antonio, Texas. The Finck family has been producing cigars 117 years straight, mostly for the territory of the old Trans-Mississippi, more recently for the country at large. Unlike a lot of old-time American cigar makers, Finck seems to understand that the internet is a great way to sell things. And they sell lots of things, particularly their own line of cigars, which number quite a few in variety.
I've been sampling Fink's offerings, starting from the cheapest on up, for awhile now, and am impressed with all of them. Finck seems determined to make the point that a machine made cigar does not have to be a shoddy cigar, their quality control is excellent, and unlike a lot of machine made cigars I have smoked, the draw on each and every one is very good. Most, but not all, of Finck's cigars are manufactured in the USA, using a variety of ingredients, from homogenized wrappers and/or binders, to natural wrappers & binders with cut filler, to mixed fillers, and even a machine made long filler model. They also offer a few hand-rolled.
The first cigar I tried was the Alamo Sweet, which is one of Finck's cheapest cigars. It features a "homogenized wrapper and binder and a select blend of good quality Nicaraguan and Connecticut fillers," and sells for around $35 per box of 50 for the full sized perfecto, less for the cigarillo. The machine made perfecto is perhaps the ultimate work cigar, easy to light, no cutter required.
As the name implies, this is a sweetened cigar, and with good reason. Homogenized wrappers and sugar go together like pancakes & syrup, and this cigar is plenty sweet. It's the sweetest Sweet I've ever tasted. If Swisher Sweets are too sugary for your tastes, stay away from this one, if however, you can't get enough syrup on your waffles, this is the cigar for you. It also burns evenly, is well constructed, and despite its modest ingredients, this little perfecto carries a certain jaunty dignity, sporting a cello wrapper and genuine cigar band featuring a picture of its namesake. In short, the Alamo Sweet is an enjoyable smoke that won't let you down. A person would have to travel a long way to find a better cigar in its class.