The Blender's Personal Stash Goes Back on Sale: RoMa Craft Foreign and Domestic Returns

RoMa Craft Tobac built its name on scarcity. Lines like CroMagnon and Intemperance ship in allocations so tight that retailers count individual boxes, and the CRAFT Maquette Series has been the most extreme version of that philosophy: small bundles of experimental blends, released once, and then gone. The Foreign and Domestic was supposed to follow that script. It did not.

Released last year as a 4 x 46 box-pressed petite corona in the CRAFT Maquette line, the Foreign and Domestic earned a distinction no other Maquette cigar has achieved: a second production run. The reason is unusual. Skip Martin, who co-founded RoMa Craft and co-owns the Nica Sueño factory in Estelí where the cigars are rolled, liked the blend so much that he placed a personal order with his own factory to keep smoking it. Rather than keep the entire batch to himself, he decided to send some to retail shelves.

The blend has more in common with RoMa Craft's regular portfolio than the craft paper bundle packaging suggests. An Indonesian Besuki binder holds corojo and criollo fillers from the Jamastrán Valley in Honduras and Condega, Nicaragua, under an Ecuadorian hybrid wrapper. Martin later confirmed that the Foreign and Domestic shares its internal blend with the Riverside 15th Anniversary cigar and the upcoming CroMagnon Visigoth, with only slight variations in the hybrid wrapper leaf distinguishing them. A smoker who has enjoyed any of those three is already in the same flavor neighborhood.

For the return run, production climbs from 500 bundles to 1,200 bundles of ten cigars, and the price holds at ten dollars per stick. The increase is meaningful. RoMa Craft is not a company that expands production casually, and moving from 500 to 1,200 bundles signals that the first run sold through cleanly enough to justify a larger commitment. The name itself carries the brand's identity in two directions. Martin lives in Nicaragua, where the cigars are made. Co-founder Michael Rosales lives in Austin, where the company is headquartered. Foreign and domestic. The phrase also echoes the oath that military service members and government officials take to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which fits a company whose other line, Marinero, draws on Martin's Navy service.

For smokers, the return of the Foreign and Domestic is an opportunity disguised as a repeat. The first run sold out quickly, and many enthusiasts never had a chance to try it. The second run is larger but still finite, and at ten dollars for a petite corona from the Nica Sueño factory, it sits in the same value territory as the Marinero bundles that RoMa Craft launched earlier this summer. If the pattern holds, the boxes will move fast. The difference this time is that there are more of them.