Podcast host and author Michael Knowles has launched a cigar company.
Knowles, who hosts The Michael Knowles Show with conservative media outlet The Daily Wire, announced the launch of Mayflower Cigars during the premiere of his Wednesday episode.
The podcast host, who is an outspoken cigar connoisseur, said the launch of his company was "a dream come true."
"My personal cigar company, MAYFLOWER CIGARS, is available for purchase for the first time," the podcast host wrote in an X post. "A project 15—nay, 400—years in the making."
Knowles teased the announcement in a series of social media posts depicting a flower with text reading, "11.8.23."
"There are few things in this life that I've loved longer than my wife, whom I first kissed at age sixteen," Knowles introduced his Wednesday episode. "Cigars happen to be one of them."
The podcast host detailed his personal history and experience with the tobacco product and mentioned his first box of cigars given to him by his mother on his fifteenth birthday.
"I had my first cigar when I was fifteen, when I was a kid," Knowles said. "The cigar rollers in the Bronx would give them to me when we went grocery shopping because I was too young to buy them."
"I wrote my college admissions essay about how much I loved cigars," he continued. "I started a cigar club in school to fund my habit as a broke college kid. I called it The Society for Intellectual Growth and Re-invigoration, or 'SIGAR.'"
Knowles said he had pitched the idea of a cigar company to The Daily Wire for about five years.
"Finally, probably just to get me to shut me up about it, they gave me the green light one year ago," Knowles said. "And crucially, they let me do whatever I want with it."
The podcast host said The Daily Wire allowed him to create the Mayflower Cigar brand and tobacco blends along with selecting a factory and distribution center.
Mayflower Cigars has released two original cigars, Mayflower Dawn and Mayflower Dusk. The former is offered in Churchill, Toro, and Robusto sizes, while the latter is available in Toro, Toro Gordo, and Robusto sizes.
"We tried out many, many blends to arrive at the absolute perfect combination of tobaccos with the absolute perfect construction and the absolute perfect amount of aging," Knowles said of Mayflower Cigars' flagship blends. "Fine-tuned precisely to my extremely exacting standards."
Knowles said the United States was "in many ways built on tobacco," citing former Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were tobacco farmers.
"Cigars have formed an integral part of the Daily Wire’s culture from the beginning," reads Mayflower Cigars website. "Our most popular show, Backstage, is filmed through the haze of cigar smoke. A statue of Elizabeth Warren in a headdress adorns the set. A Reagan humidor takes up a full wall of the executive office, filled with goods carried back by hand from a certain island nation off the coast of Florida."
"We love cigars," the website concludes. "Now, as the culmination of that love affair, we bring you Mayflower Cigars—produced, mirabile dictu, by the very same factory that made the box my mother gave me all those years ago."
Editor's Note: A previous version of this article mistakenly claimed Mayflower Dusk was available in Churchill instead of Toro Gordo.
