This may be the shortest review I write. I try to keep them short. It's just, you know, sometimes I get going, I get wordy. Four score and seven years ago...! Just kidding. Actually the Gettysburg Address isn't long either. I think it takes about two minutes to deliver. Back to the whiskey. My first experience with Kilbeggan was the Small Batch Rye. I can't remember why I bought it, but I saw it reviewed glowingly somewhere, and there were only a few bottles left in my area, so I picked it up. I opened it on Super Bowl Sunday, 2020, with the Chiefs playing the 49ers. I'd invited my parents over and my dad brought along a bottle of Aberlour A'bunadh my mom had gotten him for Christmas. Surprisingly, despite A'bunadh being the superior whisky, the Small Batch Rye held up next to it. It wasn’t quite as good, but it had a distinctive identity that made me remember it. And two years later, when it reappeared, I nabbed another two bottles, one for me, one for my pops. I purchased this Kilbeggan Single Pot Still via online order, not too long after that Super Bowl, during the pandemic. It had appeared on Whisky Advocate's Top 20 that previous year, and it was affordable, but I somehow found myself in no rush to open it. So in my collection it sat. I kept consider it, and never getting to it, until this past weekend, after football, with my brother-in-law, after we'd tasted a Laphroaig Cairdeas, a Talisker Distillers Edition, an Ardbeg Beastie, a Nikka From the Barrel, and a touch of Barrell Seagrass. It obviously wouldn't have been fair to rate the Kilbeggan Single Pot Still right then since it didn't stand a chance against those others, but I wasn't feeling it at all and figured I'd wait. Now, it's a few days later, and I'm tasting it again. And I have the same problems with it on its own that I had tasting it against the lineup. Here's the thing: it's very Irish. It's got the cereal grain and the apple and vanilla. Think Jameson or Tully on steroids. Don't think of other single pot stills. This is nothing like Redbreast, nothing like Green Spot. I'd even had to say, I prefer the candy coated cherry cough syrup flavor of the Busker to this. The problem is the apple flavor is not, like, a good apple flavor; it's like an apple that's off, and it struck me very quickly why that is. There's this underlying hit of talcum powder. And the underlying aroma reminds me of changing my kids' diapers right after they were born. If you're a parent, you know what I'm talking about. There's this brief period where the poop is a light brown smear on the diaper (or a gush that spills out the sides) rather than a real solid poop. And it doesn't smell the same way solid poop does. It's kind of mustardy. Still not necessarily something you want your whisky to smell like, but not entirely 100% revolting, and that underlying hit of talcum here also reminds me of that newborn mustard diarrhea scent. And it's killing me. Because I feel like I want to like this, but that underlying scent is holding me back. It follows through to the palate and disappears on the finish. So, at this point, Kilbeggan is batting 1 for 2 with me. They have a 19-Year around here that I'm considering. I haven't tried the standard run Kilbeggan either, but I don't think I'm going to. Honestly, this whole mustard baby poop thing really might just be me, but I can't escape it. I think I prefer the Jameson Barrel Finishes to this. I might even actually prefer your standard Jameson bottling if only to avoid the talcum. I know I said I planned to keep this short, and I'm sorry. It's just, you know, when I get going, I get...wordy. I probably just could have said, "Baby Diarrhea" and ended it there. But I felt like, because of the Small Batch Rye, I owed a bit more of an explanation.