Many people grow up around cigars, but it takes a special person to revive a legacy which is exactly what Juan Lugo of Don Doroteo Cigars did. He smoked his first “intentional” cigar while deployed in Iraq, but he took the seed of his idea back to his roots in the Dominican Republic. Lugo talked to Cigar Life Guy about how he met his partner through investing in cryptocurrency, the beauty of harvesting tobacco, and why giving back is his primary goal in the cigar industry.
First Premium Cigar Experience
Cigar Life Guy: Tell me about your first premium cigar experience.
Juan Lugo: The first official cigar that I intended on smoking- I say “intended” because having cigars in my family since birth I was always around it. So the first time I actually smoked as an adult was when I was deployed in the United States Air Force. I was military police and I was in Iraq in 2009. It was a dry base so you couldn’t drink alcohol which was my vice of choice at the time, but they did have tobacco. So you could chew tobacco, you could smoke cigars, you could smoke cigarettes. I went straight for cigars. When I saw it in this little shop I immediately felt nostalgic. So I gravitated towards the cigars. At the time I wasn’t really an aficionado or connoisseur. So I just grabbed some Montecristos from Cuba. I wound up smoking some gems because there was no embargo like here in the States.
I was nineteen years old. I had one day off a week- usually on Sundays. I would go into this abandoned hut. It was a bunker, but we turned it into a hangout spot. The base was called Al-Assad and it was one of Sadaam Hussein’s primary bases in Iraq. We found this abandoned bunker, took some lawn chairs, and set them up in a circle. That was our go-to spot. We played dominos. We couldn’t drink any alcohol. However, we had non-alcoholic beer- just for the ritual of it- and we would smoke cigars.
Merging New With Cigar Tradition
Cigar Life Guy: You were the lone family member interested in returning to the cigar business. Tell us a little about your decision and partnership with Brandon Dallman and Jeff Moss.
Juan Lugo: After the military, I went into tech. I was stationed in California. I used my GI Bill and got a degree in Business at San Jose State. I gravitated towards the entrepreneurial spirit and mindset. I picked up a gig in cyber security and then worked with AI (Artificial Intelligence) before it was a buzzword. I had no idea what it really was to be honest (laughs) even when I was working with it. Conceptualizing it was kind of nuts back then. I kept hearing other buzzwords- cryptocurrency, Bitcoin- so I wound up dipping my toe into that in late 2017. I worked numerous side jobs, so I could invest in the stock market and crypto in particular. It took a few years but in 2020 I finally started making some money. In the midst of the pandemic, I really had a great year investing. Investing led me to random chat rooms and forums like Telegram, Whatsapp, and Discord. I met a lot of interesting individuals – random investors, one of which was my future cigar partner Brandon Dallman.
It wasn’t until 2021 after we had made some great gains that a few of us were like, “Can we finally meet up in person and not be weird internet chat room people?” (laughs). So we decided to meet in San Juan Puerto Rico at a little beachfront hotel. The group had business there, but we figured we might as well have a little fun. I had no idea that anyone in the group even liked cigars. I was expecting a bunch of typical nerdy-type basement dwellers, but it was a great group of guys from all different walks of life. Brandon, a good old boy from Nebraska, walks out with a box of cigars. He sits next to me and hands out cigars. No one in the group knew cigar etiquette, so I was quick to help with cutting and lighting. Brandon and I got to talking and then he asked if I had any ties to the cigar industry. And I said, “Do I?” I told him my grandfather’s story about how he’d been growing tobacco since 1936 and his connection to La Aurora.
We talked about what was next for us. Did we want to continue the investing game? It’s kind of a soulless industry. I made some great relationships in investing but it wasn’t fulfilling other than the monetary side. It’s the polar opposite of what the cigar industry is. So I decided I did want to make a change. I told him I had been working on a business plan to revive my grandfather’s legacy, and we spent the entirety of that trip smoking cigars talking about what things would look like.
When I got home to my wife, who was pregnant with twins, I told her I thought it was time to make the plunge and quit my secure career in tech. I was going to walk away from the “golden handcuffs” as they call them and pursue the journey of an entrepreneur.
That was the beginning of Don Doroteo. The first thing I told Brandon was that we needed to make sure we were honoring my grandfather and his legacy. It wasn’t cigar-making. It was tobacco harvesting. Harvesting and selling to La Aurora exclusively was what my grandfather did and what I wanted to do. So the cigars were just a byproduct of being in that industry.
Nine months after that trip to Puerto Rico we had our first harvest.
Cigar Life Guy: Tell us how you merge tradition with creating new blends.
Juan Lugo: In other words, what’s your differentiator from a business standpoint? Obviously, there’s passion behind creating a business in this industry especially when you have family ties, but then you have to ask yourself the real tough questions. Is it a viable venture? That is the world Brandon and I came from. We had to assess and vet a lot of companies we were potentially going to invest in. What is the viability of this company? What’s their product? What’s their differentiator? Entering the cigar industry we looked at it with that lens. As much as it was a passion product, we also had to make sure we weren’t just throwing our money into a dumpster fire.
Having talked to a lot of boutique owners and other folks in the industry we didn’t want to come in looking for a blueprint. A lot of people stop where they feel like “this is the road to success. I need to have five different blends.” I think that’s the mindset of the average aficionado who wants to take this on. I didn’t care about the cigar part initially. I wanted to grow tobacco. I’m a city boy from New York (laughs). So it was the next challenge I wanted to take on. I really fell in love with working in the soil and working with the people there. Building something tangible.
When you talk about the fruits of your labor, in the investor world it’s all 1’s and 0’s. There’s no human connection. Whereas in the cigar world, it’s 100% the opposite. There’s so much fulfillment from the harvest. Then the big day is when the buyer from La Aurora shows up and they have to qualify all of your tobacco. You’re just crossing your fingers that you have tobacco in there that makes the cut for binder and if you’re lucky enough you get some for the wrapper-which is easier said than done. We haven’t been able to do that yet, but I’m proud to say that since our first harvest, most of it has been binder quality. That was a feather in our cap immediately. We wanted to make sure we were bringing forth everything we could.
Any schmuck with a wallet can go into a factory and say “Hey I want to make a cigar for my ego and put my name on it”. Any factory will give you numerous blends. It’s business. But I was really serious about this. Putting my grandfather’s name on it held a lot of weight.
Cigar Life Guy: You take pride in doing things the right way. What is the most important aspect of creating a cigar from seed that every cigar smoker should know?
Juan Lugo: The Salt of the Earth took a long time in the storming phase with the team. This is where Jeff Moss comes in. We started looking online thinking about what the award-winning cigar looks like. Who is the right person to hire for our team? We had no idea, so we started searching online. That led us to a page with a hodgepodge of boxes and ring designs. It turned out to be the award-winning Jeff Moss from Alec Bradley. We just cold-called this guy. We talked for about an hour and he told me flat out, “I don’t make rings. I build brands”. I wanted him to come visit the farm. I brought him there for the harvest in February of 2022 and he took one look and said, “You built this in nine months?”. At that moment, he said, “I’m in. Let’s go.”. He was at a crossroads himself. His contract with Alec Bradley was ending and he was thinking of moving on.
So when it came to the brainstorming phase of what this should look like. It was really like building a brand. Building a story from scratch. Brandon and Jeff would be there alongside me working on the variations of tobacco we wanted to use, but aside from that it was more so what’s the story you want to tell? That’s where Salt of the Earth comes from. Salt of the Earth is what I think of when I think of the type of man my grandfather was. That’s the type of man I am. That’s the type of man I want to be known as. I don’t want to veer away from his teachings and my upbringing. So that was the name. That’s the brand. But then I thought now what’s the blend?
I wanted to dig deep into the Dominican roots. One thing that was near and dear was the Andullo. My grandfather used to harvest tobacco and used to process it into Andullo. The beautiful part is, to get a final product you have to let it sit for a couple of years. The typical farmer in the Dominican Republic will probably do it for a year and a half and then they’ll sell them at any local grocery store. That’s what the common man smokes in the Dominican Republic. They chew it as well. So it’s pipe tobacco and chewing tobacco. That’s what my grandfather produced his entire life. In the 50’s he opened up a farmer’s market in Santiago and it’s still there today. Alongside tobacco, he had dairy products, eggs, and produce. My first actual cigar I ever smoked had Andullo tobacco. My grandfather used to walk around with a little pipe filled with Andullo tobacco and he used to roll his own box-pressed cigars with Andullo.
It’s not a delicacy there. I learned to look at Andullo tobacco in a new way. I never saw it at a PCA. It was never sold to the American consumer in a way that was appealing. I wanted to reinvent that.
We landed on two blends that eventually became the Salt of the Earth: the Cameroon, Piedra Viva, and the Corojo Piedra Angular.
When it comes to blending cigars, we’re not trying to do anything trendy. One of the things Jeff Moss, as creative director, has focused on is making sure we don’t lose that legacy within the brand. So all the visuals, the ring, the booth at PCA, and the advertisements in the magazines all have to resemble the legacy and tradition but with a modern twist.
I don’t want to be a boutique company that feels that it needs to come out with the latest and greatest every year. There are only so many ways to roll a cigar. If we’re here to make money, we’re here for the wrong reasons. If I wanted to just make money, I’d go back to crypto. This is a passion project for me. I want to make sure that we’re putting everything into every blend. We’re making what we love.
Cigar Farm and the Fair Distribution of Profits
Cigar Life Guy: You take pride in the fair distribution of profits. Can you explain what that looks like?
Juan Lugo: I can say with some confidence that most cigar manufacturers don’t own their farm and don’t harvest their own tobacco. This may sound controversial but you go into these countries, and people can get away with a lot more than they can in the United States. So being merged between both worlds- being a veteran and a citizen of the U.S., but also having close ties to my heritage in the Dominican Republic- we do a couple of things that are a little different. First and foremost, aside from having a fully working farm year-round, we don’t just hire people seasonally. This is something that might be a little controversial with a lot of tobacco manufacturers that have plants in Nicaragua, the Dominican, and Mexico. We hire people year-round. We don’t fire people because the season’s over and let people fend for themselves and their families for six months. I don’t think that’s right.
What I decided to do was farm to fork. We had this extremely fertile land in the Dominican Republic. As it is, we can’t grow tobacco year-round. Mother Nature doesn’t permit it, but crop rotation is good for the nutrients in the soil. So we rotate crops, keep the soil rich, and it also allows me to keep my folks employed. We have been growing squash. I hired my cousin as the director of operations at the farm and he talked to local supermarkets to find out what produce was needed most- something that was not going to disturb the nutrients in the soil for tobacco. We’re on our third harvest of squash. We do our tobacco harvest usually in February. I have a big ceremonial event. I invite all the local workers. We sit together, throw a feast, and we party. There’s music, food, and obviously cigars. Then we do it again when we have our squash harvest in August. We invite all the families. Our company is a family in and of itself. We have a big cookout with a traditional Dominican stew called Sancocho that incorporates a lot of squash. That’s the first step.
This is something that hasn’t come up with some of these cigar-related interviews, but one of my personal goals is to give back to the community. That’s important to me. Keeping people employed full-time year-round is step two. Step three is setting up ways that we can help kids in impoverished countries get access to the things that are foundational in the United States, but are not foundational in other places. Everything from auxiliary English to STEM. Anything that’s related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. I’m passionate about it because I’ve seen the difference it makes. I want to do that through our company.
Passions Beyond Cigars
Cigar Life Guy: What is one of your passions outside of cigars? What would people not know about you?
Juan Lugo: I think I just answered a lot of that in the last question(laughs)! I’m pretty open on social media, so you’ll see all of my announcements there. Shooting a bow or shooting guns- some of the fun things I learned in the military. As it pertains to business, it’s kind of difficult to go into PCA as a boutique guy and make major dents in the universe. For me, it’s about giving back to my community in the Dominican and family. I was finally able to take my kids to the farm. My twins were born at the same time the company was born. It’s been kind of symbolic of how the company went from its infancy to its crawling phase. I had this dream to take my wife and kids to the farm and have them walk to their grandparents’ house which is just a three-minute walk from the farm. Over the summer we were able to do that. Seeing it in action was so great. That’s what it’s about for me. I truly love the country and giving back. That’s what our company is about.
Follow Juan on Instagram and check out the latest from Don Doroteo Cigars here.
photo credit: Juan Lugo