The Behike Turns Fifteen: Inside Cohiba's Most Coveted Anniversary Box

There are cigars one smokes, and there are cigars one waits for. The Cohiba Behike has always belonged firmly to the second category. Fifteen years after it first appeared — to a chorus of superlatives that has scarcely quietened since — Havana has chosen to celebrate its most venerated creation in the only manner befitting it: with restraint, with ceremony, and in vanishingly small numbers.

The result is the Cohiba Behike 15 Aniversario Selection, unveiled before the assembled aficionados of the world at the twenty-fifth Festival del Habano, in the Havana winter of 2025. To call it a box of cigars would be to call a Patek Philippe a device for telling the time. It is, rather, a statement — a punctuation mark in the long sentence of Cuban tobacco.

A line, reassembled

For the first time, the four vitolas that constitute the Behike universe are gathered side by side in a single handcrafted case: the BHK 52, where the legend was born; the poised BHK 54; the sumptuous BHK 56; and — the news that set forums alight — the brand-new BHK 58, the largest format the line has ever known, making its world debut within this very selection. Each wears a band struck for the occasion, a discreet flourish that collectors will recognise at a glance and, one suspects, guard jealously.

The leaf that explains everything

To understand why the Behike inspires something close to devotion, one must speak of a single leaf. The Medio Tiempo grows only at the very crown of the tobacco plant, and only on a fortunate minority of plants — fewer than one in ten. It is the most concentrated tobacco Cuba produces, dense with oil and aroma, and it is the secret ingredient that lends the Behike its formidable depth. That so rare a material should be folded, by hand, into every cigar of this box tells you most of what you need to know about the ambition on display.

An hour, or two, well spent

The pleasure, of course, lies in the smoking. A Behike does not announce itself; it unfolds. The first third is all elegance — toasted almond, a whisper of white flowers, a vein of vanilla running beneath. By the middle, the Medio Tiempo asserts itself without apology: dark cocoa, damp earth, the bitterness of a good espresso. And in the final stretch comes the crescendo every devotee waits for — black pepper, caramelised sweetness, and the unmistakable savour of well-aged leaf. The BHK 58, at one hundred and seventy-eight millimetres, stretches that journey past the two-hour mark for those with the evening, and the patience, to give it.

The art of scarcity

Cuba has never been in the business of flooding the market with its finest, and this anniversary edition is no exception. Production was deliberately modest; allocation, fierce. What reaches the cabinets of the world's Casas del Habano will not linger there. For the collector, the calculus is simple: a box such as this is bought to be kept as readily as it is bought to be enjoyed — and very often, both.

At La Casa del Habano Brussels

We are proud to offer the Cohiba Behike 15 Aniversario Selection to our clients across the globe, each cigar guaranteed authentic and conserved in impeccable conditions from the fields of the Vuelta Abajo to your humidor. It is, quite simply, one of the most desirable objects the cigar world has produced this decade — and, like all great things, it will not wait forever.