The journey to founding MokaCigar started long before the company existed. It started in a private humidor in London, with a box of Behikes that arrived at the door cracked, dry, and short two cigars. The seller refused a refund. The box had no traceable code. There was no recourse.
That experience repeated itself across the British market with depressing consistency — boxes of dubious origin, broken cold chains, seals that wouldn't survive a magnifier, and sellers who treated provenance as a marketing line instead of a compliance discipline. The Cuban grey market is a category that rewards sloppiness because the buyer rarely knows enough to call it out.
We built MokaCigar to be the opposite. Every cigar in our cellar is hand-selected at La Casa del Habano flagship in Havana, authenticated against Habanos S.A. box-code records before it leaves Cuba, and held in our London cellar at 70°F / 70% RH from intake to despatch. Every shipment includes a signed certificate of authenticity with the box code, intake date, climate log, and the name of the person on our side who inspected it.
That last part matters. We sign our work because we're accountable for it. If a buyer ever opens a MokaCigar box and something is wrong — anything is wrong — we want them to know exactly who answered for it.