Rating: 15/23 I just filed my taxes, so I figured I should open something new to celebrate. Not something super expensive, mind you, since I just had to pay the IRS a boat-load of dollars, but something decently nice that I haven't tried before. Jack Daniel's seemed like the all-American answer to my conundrum of what to go with. thought that the regular rye was a little better than Old No. 7 and thought that the Single Barrel Tennessee whiskey was solid. I'm hoping that this will be a bit better than the single barrel Tennessee whiskey. I have little hope of it matching Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Barrel Proof Tennesse whiskey, but we'll see. N: Mmmm! This smells really hedonistic - just what I was looking for. There's this bold - but not flat - woody layer up front. Coming out of it are plenty of spices and some green banana. Hints of minerals for sure, but they don't make it seem lighter. There's a lot of interesting must from the wood. Digging in deeper, I get some bitter herbal and sour green apple. Not the most complex nose overall, but it has a great wood foundation and smells really nice. P: Thinner than I'd hoped, but not bad. The minerals do hit me a lot here. The wood plays a lesser roles and the banana and green apple are sweeter than expected. There's some nice nuance in the wood, but the flavor is lighter than I'd like. At some point toward the late palate, I start getting vanilla. There are some spicy herbs throughout, but they're light. There's a bit of rich caramel as well in here. Very faint creosote at times too. F: Green banana, green apple, herbal spice, light minerals, faint wood. - Conclusion - I love the nose; it's just unfortunate that the palate is so thin and light. Where are those bold flavors that the nose promised me? This could be called elegant for sure, but at 47% ABV, it's somehow still watery. The flavors are all so good, but they just aren't concentrated enough. Perhaps cutting some Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Barrel Proof (21/23) with this could produce a tasty dram that gives me my rye fix.. Woodinville Rye (15/23) has a flatter, less interesting profile, but it's substantially less thin, despite being slightly lower proof. Coming back to this, the banana tastes kind of like candy and there just isn't enough body here. It really pains me that the proof is so low here because this is otherwise an awesome whiskey. As much as I want to say that this is better, it's just so thin that I don't think I can. This seems to be a pretty fair matchup for Elijah Craig Small Batch (a low 15/23). Evan Williams Single Barrel (14/23) also seems pretty close, but I'd say that this is definitely the better of the two. Based on these side-by-sides, this is going to be a 14 or 15. I think I'm leaning just a bit more toward a 15. What kills me is that I think that this would be an awesome dram at 60% ABV - probably solid competition for Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Barrel Proof. To think that they could have sold a much better version of this for just 30% more...