Apostate Death Mask on the Way to Stores

Last year, Apostate Cigars announced a new distribution agreement with Oveja Negra brands. This week, the first Apostate cigar from Fábrica Oveja Negra is heading to stores.

Death Mask is a 5 1/2 x 48 robusto made with a Mexican San Andrés wrapper over an Ecuadorian binder and Nicaraguan filler tobaccos. The Fábrica Oveja Negra factory in Estelí, Nicaragua is best known as the home of Black Label Trading Co.

Each cigar has an MSRP of $20 each, and only 250 boxes of 20 were released. In an email, Brandon Oveson, co-founder of Apostate Cigars, told halfwheel that boxes of Death Mask started shipping to retailers on Oct. 1.

Apostate Cigars was founded in 2020 by Oveson and Kendrick Woolstenhulme, and the company gets its name from a term in Mormon culture that refers to the fact that choosing to smoke cigars is an open act of rebellion against the church’s teachings, as tobacco is forbidden in Mormon culture. Woolstenhulme and Oveson both grew up in Utah as active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who are also known as Mormons.

The company’s cigars are named after parts of the religion. In the case of this limited edition, the name refers to the fact that Church of Latter Day Saints founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum both had death masks, a plaster impression of a person’s face, made shortly after their deaths in 1844.

Brooks Whittington

I have worn many hats in my life up to this point: I started out as a photojournalist for the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, then transitioned to photographing weddings—both internationally and in the U.S.—for more than a decade. After realizing that there was a need for a cigar website containing better photographs and more in-depth information about each release, I founded my first cigar blog, SmokingStogie, in 2008. SmokingStogie quickly became one of the more influential cigar blogs on the internet, known for reviewing preproduction, prerelease, rare, extremely hard-to-find and expensive cigars, and it was one of the predecessors to halfwheel, which I co-founded.