Lars Tetens, the Original Cigar Infuser, Has Died

Lars Tetens, the man who built an empire on what he insisted on calling conditioned cigars rather than flavored ones, died this week after battling heart problems. He was one of the true characters of the premium cigar world: hand-rolling his own cigars in the early 1980s and selling them out of plastic bags, then riding the mid-1990s boom to genuine celebrity before fading out of the industry for nearly two decades. Alan Rubin brought him back under the Alec Bradley umbrella in 2019, though the brands did not follow when Scandinavian Tobacco Group bought Alec Bradley in 2023. Tetens was a musician and artist outside of tobacco as well, and his leather goods and spice lines ran alongside the cigars. Whatever you thought of flavored tobacco, Tetens proved there was a market for it decades before anyone used the word infusion, and his passing closes one of the industry's most unusual chapters.