Knob Creek 12 Year Small Batch Bourbon

N: Oak and sweet corn lead off, but then there's smooth caramel, vanilla, toffee, red fruit, coffee. Peach and pear come in under a layer of caramel. The oak keeps coming back a little different - sometimes sweet, sometimes charred with tobacco notes. Every Knob Creek bottle I've had - which is quite a few, because the NAS version was an old standby for me for years - has something that's recognizable (to me, at least) as the Knob Creek profile. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what it is, but I'll try: some combination of cooked vanilla, little bit of caramel, and an earthy char. This bottle has it in spades and I think it's a really nice expression of the profile - just a little softer and more refined than you would get from the old NAS. P: Caramel and vanilla backbone with a soft fruit underbelly - peach, pear, red apple., apricot - all of it very ripe. Wood starts in around the middle and turns the fruit sour, then cooks it all in baking spices. Then there's some smoke and char that's laced with vanilla. Finish is light cinnamon and other baking spices - only a little burn. The fruit turns tangy and then slightly bitter, combines with more of that baking spice, and then the three - tangy, bitter, spicy - all ride out together. This is a pretty damn good bourbon. The fruitiness of it is a surprise. A good balance of caramel, vanilla, cinnamon, oak, and spice with maybe a dash of smoke is what I expect from Knob Creek. This is all that, plus. The fruit shifts across the experience from ripe to cooked to eventually feeling like it's just been soaking in booze for a few hours - it's like eating the fruit mash out of an Old Fashioned that's been sitting on the bar all night. I don't think I've ever done that, mostly because the drink wouldn't last that long, but it doesn't sound like a terrible idea to me.