Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust 10th Jubilee: Steve Saka's Anniversary Smoke Delivers

A Decade of Doing It His Own Way

Steve Saka founded Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust in 2015 after walking away from a much bigger seat at the table in the cigar industry, and in the ten years since, he's built one of the few boutique brands that actually lives up to the hype around it. Mi Querida, Sobremesa, Sin Compromiso — these aren't just cult favorites with good marketing, they've stacked up 90-plus scores across the board for a decade because the blending is genuinely good. So when Dunbarton announced the 10th Jubilee to mark the anniversary, I paid attention. This is the company's first national release built around an Ecuadorian Sumatra-seed wrapper, a leaf Saka has name-dropped in interviews for years without putting it front and center. I grabbed a five-pack the week it landed at my shop and worked through three of them over ten days before sitting down to write this.

Construction: What You're Actually Holding

The 10th Jubilee comes in one size, a 5 5/8 x 48 corona gorda, which is exactly the kind of format I want from an anniversary blend — no gimmicky box-press, no oversized ring gauge trying to look important. The wrapper is a cocoa-brown Ecuadorian Sumatra-seed leaf, silky to the touch with a faint bit of tooth and a few visible veins that never once caused a problem. Underneath is a Mexican binder, and the filler pulls from four separate regions in Nicaragua — Condega, Estelí, Jalapa, and Ometepe. That's a lot of real estate for one blend to draw from, and it shows in how much the flavor shifts over the course of the smoke. Cold draw was coffee and cedar, easy and open, with none of the bitterness that sometimes creeps into a tight pre-light draw.

First Third to Nub

I lit the first one on my back porch on a sticky Jacksonville evening, which is honestly the correct climate to test a cigar's construction. The first third opens with that creamy black pepper the tasting box promises, and underneath it there's a background sweetness — something like ripe fruit — that I wasn't expecting from a blend with this much Nicaraguan filler. By the midpoint, the pepper settles back and lets baking spice, molasses, leather, and a faint floral note take the lead. It's a genuinely elegant transition, not the usual blunt-force pepper-bomb thing a lot of Nicaraguan-heavy blends default to.

The final third is where the 10th Jubilee earns its name. Cocoa deepens into something closer to espresso, with a cherry note riding along the edges, and that pepper backbone is still there but it's been a supporting player the whole time rather than the star. Construction was excellent across all three sticks — razor-straight burns, one minor touch-up on the second stick, and an ash that held in long, chalky-gray segments well past where I expected it to drop.

What I Poured Alongside It

For a cigar with this much baking spice and a pepper backbone that sticks around, I wanted something with rye spice of its own rather than a soft, corn-forward bourbon that would get flattened. I reached for the bottle of Elijah Craig Barrel Proof Rye A126 I still had open from earlier this year — nearly 12 years old, 120.4 proof, loaded with cherry and vanilla cream before the cinnamon and pepper roll in on the finish. The cherry in the rye matched almost note-for-note with the cherry I was getting on the cigar's back third, and the rye spice gave the pepper backbone something to talk to instead of just sitting there. If you want to keep the proof lower, Russell's Reserve 13 Year would do a similar job with a gentler touch.

What I appreciate most about the 10th Jubilee is that it doesn't feel like an anniversary cigar built to cash in on nostalgia. Dunbarton could have leaned on Mi Querida's reputation or dressed up Sobremesa in a new band and called it a celebration. Instead they built something new around a wrapper leaf that clearly needed the right blend to show what it can do, and they got the ratio right on the first national try. That's harder than it sounds — plenty of boutique brands need two or three releases to dial in a new leaf.

Final Verdict

Ten years in, Steve Saka is still doing the thing that made Dunbarton worth paying attention to in the first place: building blends with real structure instead of chasing trends. The 10th Jubilee isn't the boldest cigar in the lineup — Mi Querida still wins that fight — but it might be the most complete, and the Ecuadorian Sumatra-seed wrapper gives it a personality none of Dunbarton's other blends quite have. Pair it with a high-proof rye on a warm evening and you've got one of the better hours I've spent on the porch this year. Score: 93/100.