Hooten Young Ships Midnight Hammer 2026

Hooten Young’s second release of Midnight Hammer, named after the 2025 American bombing of Iran, is on the way to stores.

Midnight Hammer 2026 uses the same vitola and blend as last year’s release: a 6 x 60 torpedo made with a Mexican San Andrés maduro wrapper covering a binder and filler blend of Nicaraguan tobacco. It has an unfinished, “shaggy” foot, and the cigars are being rolled at the Tabacalera CM factory in Nicaragua.

Each cigar has an MSRP of $17 and it is packaged in 20-count boxes. Only 500 boxes are being released.

While the newest version of the Midnight Hammer is the same cigar as last year’s debut release, there is one change. The original release of the Midnight Hammer was sold exclusively in four-count bags; the 2026 version is primarily sold in 20-count boxes, an option not available last year.

In addition to the cigars, Hooten Young is releasing the Bomber Buddy, a plastic travel case with a shape inspired by the World War Two era AN-M64 bomb. Each Bomber Buddy can hold a single Midnight Hammer cigar and the tail-fin base of the case can be removed and used as a cigar stand.

There are two purchasing options for the Bomber Buddy: the case and one Midnight Hammer 2026 has an MSRP of $40, while the case and five Midnight Hammer 2026 cigars are priced at $100. There are a total of 200 Bomber Buddies being released.

Boxes of the Midnight Hammer and the Bomber Buddy started shipping today.

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.