Matt Booth built a cigar about the end of the world, then priced it so you could smoke one every day until it happens. That is the whole joke of the Doomsayer, and the punchline is that the cigar under the apocalypse marketing is calm, woody, and genuinely easy to live with.
The Room101 Doomsayer is a 6×55 Super Toro, the only size the line has ever come in, rolled at Tabacalera William Ventura in the Dominican Republic and launched in July 2019 at $7.50 a stick. The version on this page is the Passive, which wears an Ecuadorian Habano wrapper over an Indonesian binder with fillers from Nicaragua, Honduras, and Pennsylvania broadleaf. It ships in a 55-count cabinet, a ring gauge 55 cigar in a box of 55, and no, that is not a coincidence.
- Room101 Doomsayer Passive, a 6×55 Super Toro in Ecuadorian Habano over an Indonesian binder with Nicaraguan, Honduran, and Pennsylvania broadleaf fillers. Rolled at Tabacalera William Ventura in the Dominican Republic, sold in 55-count cabinets, about $8 to $9 a stick.
- French-roast coffee, cedar, oak, and buttered toast with a mineral edge and a polite black pepper finish. Mild-to-medium building to medium, roughly 70 minutes of steady smoke.
- BLC Rating: 86/100 and worth a five-pack. A value Super Toro that takes the apocalypse as a joke and the tobacco seriously, priced where trying one is a low-stakes decision.
FROM THE PORCH
I crossed paths with the Doomsayer the right way: at an event in New Orleans, with good people around and no plans to be anywhere else. I’d heard about this cigar plenty before that night, so when it landed in front of me I gave it its shot. I enjoyed the cigar, I enjoyed the company, and I did what you do in New Orleans, picked up a few before heading home. But good cigars have a habit of getting tangled up with good rooms, and I wanted to know how much of that night belonged to the cigar itself.
So it came out to the porch, where every cigar gets judged on even terms. It didn’t let me down. First light, and everything I remember about New Orleans came right back with it, which is about the highest compliment a memory can pay a cigar. Dallas was out here too, technically in the picture, mostly camera shy. He approved anyway. My notes are below.
BEHIND THE BLEND
Matt Booth started Room101 in 2003 as a Los Angeles luxury jewelry brand, the name nods to the torture room in Orwell’s 1984 and to the 101 Freeway near his Hollywood headquarters. A former U.S. Marine infantryman, he crossed into cigars in 2009 through a partnership with Camacho, quit the industry outright in February 2017, then relaunched Room101 as an independent company in 2019 with the Doomsayer as its mid-priced line. The cherry blossom on the band, called a sakura, carries over from the years his Marine deployments kept him in Asia. In June 2022 Booth sold the cigar brand to Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s Forged Cigar Company and stayed on as creative director, the provocateur became the brand’s caretaker instead of its owner.
BLC BLEND BREAKDOWN
BLEND SPECS
One band, two blends, that is the Doomsayer’s quirk. The Passive reviewed here wears the Ecuadorian Habano wrapper, its darker sibling the Aggressive wears a maduro, which just means a darker, longer-fermented leaf, and the company lists that one as Ecuadorian too. Binder and filler are identical in both. The Pennsylvania broadleaf in the filler is the sneaky detail, American leaf with old-school grit, and it keeps a mild cigar from tasting empty.
ONE SIZE, TWO BLENDS
| VITOLA | SIZE | FORMAT |
|---|---|---|
| Super Toro, Passive (Habano), reviewed | 6 × 55 | Parejo |
| Super Toro, Aggressive (Maduro) | 6 × 55 | Parejo |
The Doomsayer has come in exactly one size since 2019: a 6×55 the launch materials called a Super Toro and the company’s current site lists simply as a Toro. It is a parejo, a straight-sided cigar with no taper, and a thick one, ring gauge is diameter in 64ths of an inch, so 55 works out to just over four-fifths of an inch across. The cabinets hold 55 cigars to match the 55 ring gauge, an intentional bit of Booth math. The bands on Passive and Aggressive are near-identical, so the wrapper shade is your only tell: the Passive is a medium reddish brown, the Aggressive is roasted-coffee dark.
THE COLD DRAW
The Passive’s wrapper is that medium reddish brown tobacconists call Colorado, laid on clean with fine veins and flat seams. Two bands dress it: the black-and-gold main band with Room101’s cherry-blossom medallion, and a slim gold foil beneath it spelling DOOMSAYER between two dots. It is a lot of dressing for an $8 cigar, which is very much the point. Off the foot I get cedar and a soft buttered-toast sweetness, the cold draw adds a little cabinet spice, the kind of tingle you notice on the lips more than the tongue. A straight cut, an easy draw, no drama before the light.
BLC CIGAR PROFILE
Here is the honest shape of the Passive: it is a calm cigar that moves in inches, not leaps. French-roast coffee leads early, wood owns the middle, mineral takes the end, and the strength walks from mild-to-medium up to a true medium right at the finish. Nobody buys a Doomsayer for fireworks. You buy it for seventy quiet minutes that cost less than lunch.
THE FIRST THIRD
The first inch is French-roast coffee with a stony mineral edge, the flavor equivalent of black coffee in a metal camp mug. Oak and cedar sit right behind it, and the buttered toast from the cold draw hangs on as a low sweetness underneath. The retrohale, pushing a little smoke out through the nose, carries a polite black pepper that never once turns into a bite. Mild-to-medium, smooth, and completely unhurried.
THE SECOND THIRD
The middle is where the Doomsayer settles into what it actually is, a wood cigar with good manners. Cedar takes the lead from the coffee, a rye-bread and baking-spice note fills in behind it, and a faint dried-fruit sweetness shows up in the background if you slow down enough to look for it. The transitions are small and honest, this blend does not fake complexity it does not have. Steady burn, solid ash, nothing to fix.
THE FINAL THIRD
The last stretch is where the mineral note finally overtakes the coffee, and the cigar picks up its only real muscle. The pepper firms up on the retrohale and the strength climbs to an honest medium, which for this blend qualifies as raising its voice. It stays cool and clean down to a small nub, no bitterness, no hot finish. Total time ran right around 70 minutes, which is a generous stretch of smoke for the money.
WHAT IT COSTS
The Doomsayer launched in 2019 at $7.50 a cigar, $412.50 for the full 55-count cabinet. Today a single runs about $8 to $9 at most shops, and cabinets land around $440. That bracket is the entire argument: a long-filler premium, meaning whole leaves running the length of the cigar rather than chopped scraps, from a respected Dominican factory, at a price that forgives experimentation. A 55-count cabinet is a commitment. The per-stick math is not.
OVERALL RATING
BLC OVERALL RATING
An 86 puts the Doomsayer Passive exactly where it lives: a calm, well-built value Super Toro that does a few things cleanly instead of many things loudly, and at about $8 it never has to apologize for that. It gives you honest coffee and wood, one real costume change at the end, and construction that behaves for the full 70 minutes. Judge it against $15 sticks and you miss the point. Judge it against its own price and it looks very comfortable.
WHO GRABS THIS CIGAR
This is a weekday cigar for a smoker with taste and a budget, the one you reach for when you want something better than a bundle smoke without pricing the hour like an occasion. It is friendly to newer smokers too: a mild-to-medium start, a slow build, and a thick, forgiving ring gauge. And the end-of-the-world branding makes it the easiest conversation starter in the shop, nobody forgets the apocalypse cigar with the cherry blossom on it.
Skip it if you need power or constant transitions, the Aggressive next to it on the shelf is the louder sibling, and plenty of cigars on this site will happily push your palate harder. Grab it if calm, woody, and inexpensive sounds like a Tuesday well spent. Booth sells it as escapism. It smokes like a routine you would actually keep.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Common questions about the Room101 Doomsayer 6×55 Super Toro.
