Pours a golden orange color with adorable little legs (i.e. not much). Smells sweet, caramel, toffee, vanilla, leavened with hints of spice. Love the nose on this. Not intense, but it hits the right notes for me. Taste hits the spice a little harder, but the underlying sweetness is still there, a little caramel and vanilla goes a long way. Mouthfeel is soft and approachable, light on the booze (keep in mind by beer palate is unused to this sort of assault, so this is saying something). Overall, this is an all purpose bourbon, great neat and I’m sure it would do fine in cocktails. Would be perfect for bourbon-oaked homebrew. It’s not intense or mind-blowing, but it gets the job done. Beer Nerd Musings: The Buffalo Trace Eclipse variant won the blind horizontal tasting I held several years ago, narrowly beating out Four Roses and Elijah Craig 12 (each of which had a single outlier that dragged them down). Local brewery Neshaminy Creek got in a whole boatload of Buffalo Trace barrels a while back and aged a few beers that I’ve had in them, to varying degrees of success (I think any issues I have with them come down to the base beer). Not quite as local, but Voodoo brewing made a Black Magick variant aged in BT barrels that was phenomenal (if not quite the equal of the Pappy Black Magick). This is much harder to find these days than it used to be - would be great for homewbrew purposes otherwise…