CAO Amazon Basin Dagger | halfwheel

A couple of months ago, I was browsing Reddit’s r/cigars and stumbled across this post from a user who had purchased some Amazon Basin Rothschilds from Switzerland. While there are thousands of cigars I’ve never heard of, keeping track of new cigars is literally a part of my job, and a new version of Amazon Basin is something that would, seemingly, be difficult for me to miss.

As it turned out, that cigar was a 2024 release, an exclusive for Europe. It’s certainly something that we at halfwheel were never formally informed about, which is a shame, as I imagine the same people who are reading this sentence would also be amongst the same people interested in learning about another new Amazon Basin.

Less than a week after my Reddit discovery, General Cigar Co. was making an announcement about a new, smaller CAO Amazon Basin, albeit not the Rothschild.

Instead, it was about the CAO Amazon Basin Dagger, a 4 x 38 petit corona. It uses the same blend that the larger sizes currently use: an Ecuadorian Sumatra-seed wrapper, a Nicaraguan binder and filler tobaccos grown in Brazil, Colombia and the Dominican Republic.

When General Cigar Co. introduced the Amazon Basin in 2014, Brazilian tobacco was the focal point of the release. The company says the Brazilian tobacco is Bragança, a varietal grown in the Amazon rainforest. It is rolled into tubes called carottes, fermented under high pressure and then transported out of the rainforest by canoe. That tobacco eventually makes its way to the STG Estelí factory in Nicaragua, which makes the cigar.

This is the third vitola, or at least the third I know about, for the Amazon Basin line:

• CAO Amazon Basin (6 x 52) — 2014
• CAO Amazon Basin Rothschild (4 1/2 x 52) — 2024
• CAO Amazon Basin Dagger (4 x 38) — 2025

All three are limited, though the 6 x 52 Amazon Basin has been released annually since 2022, albeit the 2023 version was a slightly different release called CAO Amazon Basin Extra Añejo. Unlike the Rothschild, the Dagger is sold in the U.S.

• Cigar Reviewed: CAO Amazon Basin Dagger
• Country of Origin: Nicaragua
• Factory: STG Estelí
• Wrapper: Ecuador (Sumatra)
• Binder: Nicaragua
• Filler: Brazil, Colombia & Dominican Republic
• Length: 4 Inches
• Ring Gauge: 38
• Shape: Round
• MSRP: $5 (Pack of 5, $24.99)
• Release Date: June 2, 2025
• Number of Cigars Released: 2,750 Boxes of 50 Cigars (137,500 Total Cigars)
• Number of Cigars Smoked For Review: 3

While I don’t have a photographic memory, these wrappers certainly look like a tiny version of the CAO Amazon Basin. There’s no band, which is the original cigar’s defining feature, but the muddled and veiny wrapper is very familiar. What’s not so familiar is how sweet everything smells. The first and second cigars’ wrappers smell like a very sweet ketchup-heavy barbecue sauce, while the third cigar is even sweeter with more of a Big Red soda-like aroma. The aromas are medium-plus, pushing medium-full on the third cigar. The foot of the first cigar would be pretty sweet, if not for the contrast to the wrapper. It has a more pedestrian aroma of earth and citrus, though the second cigar has more of the Big Red-like smell underneath the wrapper. Again, the third cigar is the sweetest, though this time more like a grape soda. Just by smelling the foot, I would guess that this was a flavored cigar. I’m unsure what the flavor is, but the cold draws of all three have some sort of fruit sweetness. It’s a unique and sweet fruity flavor that is foreign to me, but it dominates each cigar and stumps my brain. Beyond that, I find some intense pepper on the first cigar, a touch of metallic accents on the second cigar and some salt on the third cigar, but the profile is dominated by that other flavor.

Each time I light up the CAO Amazon Basin Dagger, I expect to get some of that sweetness from the cold draw, but it’s not there. Instead, the cigar leans heavily into a deep woody profile with accents of toastiness, earth and saltiness. Compared to many cigars with woody profiles, this is a much thicker and detailed woodiness that tastes like I could bite into it. There aren’t many changes over the next 15 minutes. There’s the woodiness, muddiness, leather and black pepper, all strong, vibrant and working well together. The third cigar has a bit more starch, but the differences are minor until I retrohale. When doing so, the list of flavors changes, and the way the smoke hits the palate is completely different. The aforementioned main flavors are more or less nowhere to be found, just a minor amount of the deep woodiness as a residual flavor. Instead, a sweet cedar and nuttiness lead to saltiness, pineapple-sweetness and a mild pepper. Given the differences between the main flavor and retrohale, it’s as if I’m smoking two different cigars. Flavor is full, body is medium-full and strength is medium-full. Construction is great, which is good as it would be a bit frustrating to have construction woes not even 20 minutes into a cigar.

Just as you read that, I’m here to tell you that each cigar’s smoke production drops at some point in the second third. Sometimes it’s at the start, other times, in the middle. The main flavors don’t really change until the final third nears, when the woodiness that had edged out the other flavors is overtaken by the toastiness or, in the third cigar, nuttiness. Black pepper, the deep woodiness, bread, creaminess and some grapefruit round out the rest of the main flavors, which are very intertwined. Retrohales are getting more and more like a hybrid between the flavor in the mouth and what I experienced in the first third. The feel, or body, is very similar to before: much smoother and completely different than how the smoke hits the mouth. The flavors are becoming similar as the nuttiness leads, but earth, black pepper and toastiness are now present each time I blow through the nose. Far and away, the most notable development is that the exotic sweetness from the cold draw is now showing up as a secondary flavor during the retrohale, though I’m not any closer to finding out what it is. Flavor is full, body is a tad thinner but medium-full and strength is medium-full.

While the final third is probably my least favorite of the bunch, I do feel like it’s what the cigar is supposed to be. It’s a bit less refined, though slightly amped up with the earthiness and woodiness, now almost matched by a vibrant black pepper. Whereas the earlier parts of the cigar tended to have a very compact profile, now the flavors seem to be expanding into more parts of the palate, creating a more aggressive approach, even if the flavors haven’t changed all that much. More than in the earlier parts, the finish seems not to let up. It’s saltier and sharper, but the level of intensity doesn’t seem to drop in the time I wait in between each puff, a pretty rare thing for me to experience. Retrohales continue to get closer and closer to the main flavor, by the end of the cigar, the only real difference I can taste between retrohaling and not is that when I use my nostrils, there’s some berry sweetness under the core flavors. Flavor is full, body is medium-full to full and strength is either medium-plus, noticeably lighter than the second cigar. Given the combustion issues I was having in the second third, I spent the last 20 minutes paying a bit more attention to the burn and, as such, avoided any construction issues in the final third.

Final Notes

• I remember when I first learned about the Amazon Basin. At the conclusion of the IPCPR Convention & Trade Show, the halfwheel team used to meet up and divide up the sample cigars we were given. For many years, this process took place at I LOVE BURGERS, a now-closed restaurant in The Venetian in Las Vegas. Brooks Whittington mentioned the Amazon Basin and the story about the Amazon Rainforest tobacco. I would have never guessed that of all the ideas that early 2010s General Cigar Co. tried, its most successful launches would be the Amazon Basin and Chillin’ Moose.
• We now do things very differently, most notably, not using trade show samples for reviews. If we did the whole trading of review samples, I wouldn’t have much to trade as I’m pretty sure I left the 2025 PCA Convention & Trade Show with fewer than 10 sample cigars.
• It is difficult to describe how much of a unicorn the Amazon Basin has been for General. In late 2010, much to the dismay of many retailers and consumers, General assumed control of the CAO brand, which had been operating with more or less the same management as when the Ozgener family owned the company. General had released a few different new CAO concepts—OSA Sol, Concert, a series of cigars named after natural disasters—but it was fighting an uphill battle to convince its customers that it wasn’t going to destroy CAO. In 2013, things seemed to turn with the introduction of Flathead, which has been a much better commercial success. However, Amazon Basin developed a cult following, enough so that General brought it back. While I’m sure General’s leadership or STG’s shareholders would prefer the success of Flathead over Amazon Basin, I bet if you asked the employees, they’d tell you it would be more difficult to come up with another Amazon Basin success than it would be for a Flathead success. Even for the brands that are more apt to have followings, it’s rare to develop a product that truly sells itself.
• I’m a little surprised these cigars aren’t pre-cut. Davidoff, RoMa Craft Tobac and others have pre-cut cigars of this size.
• General Cigar Co. advertises on halfwheel.
• Cigars for this review were purchased by halfwheel.

• These cigars are listed at 4 x 38, above are the dimensions I found for the three cigars I smoked for this review.
• Final smoking time was 50 minutes for the first cigar, an hour and 20 minutes for the third cigar and just under an hour for the third. I’m unsure why the second cigar took so much longer, but it was a lot slower in the second half.
• Site sponsors Atlantic Cigar Co., Cigars Direct, Cigar Hustler, Corona Cigar Co., Famous Smoke Shop, Fox Cigar, and JR Cigar carry the CAO Amazon Basin Dagger.

Charlie Minato

I am an editor and co-founder of halfwheel.com/Rueda Media, LLC. I previously co-founded and published TheCigarFeed, one of the two predecessors of halfwheel. I have written about the cigar industry for more than a decade, covering everything from product launches to regulation to M&A. In addition, I handle a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff here at halfwheel. I enjoy playing tennis, watching boxing, falling asleep to the Le Mans 24, wearing sweatshirts year-round and eating gyros. echte liebe.