Sometimes you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. I was in a Total Wine picking up a Garrison Brothers Cowboy when I saw this 2020 wooden coffin in the aisle, decided to go for it and brought it home. I had tucked it away and forgot about it until recently, so now that I’m half a bottle into this, let’s see what I’ve managed to find in this one. The nose starts with cinnamon churros, fruits of cherry and orange zest, grape must, cloves, leading to light cognac influence, dark chocolate-covered raisins then dusty oak, leather and finishing with buttery caramel popcorn, almost no ethanol on the nose. On the taste: medium-thin mouthfeel starts with light caramel covering over cinnamon churros, then to fruits of cherry, orange zest, grape must, some spice of cloves, then light cognac notes, dark chocolate covered raisins leading to barrel spices of dusty oak and light ethanol burn. The finish is medium length cinnamon churros coming back covered in caramel then fruits of cherry, orange zest, grape must, leading to those cognac notes, dark chocolate-covered raisins with barrel spices, dusty oak and a last note of buttery caramel popcorn that lingers for a few minutes after each taste. Overall, I think this is a great sipper but I wish it was a higher proof. I think what happened is that the blender was able to work towards creating something incredible and after all that time and energy had something near perfection. Then when the work for the blender was done, marketing came in, took a few drinks, cause it’s a bad ass bourbon, then checked the proof and dumped a bunch of water to make it fit their blood temperature requirement of 98.6, bottled it up, put them in coffins and shipped them out. The mouthfeel is very thin and picking out notes from this was hard. As an experiment for comparison, I watered down my Peerless bourbon proof from 112.8 to 98.6 and had the same issue as the flavors became more muted. Hopefully one day Lux Row will decide to either get rid of this gimmick and release cask strength versions or do an Ardbeg style of Committee bottlings at higher strength and a standard bottling for the wider release. If this had been cask strength, I think this would have easily been a 5, but watering it down brought it to 3.5 for me.