Nose is apple, sugar, sweet tarts. Cherry. Fantastic nose. You could stop here and be all set. You should stop here and be all set. Body is apple, cherry. Herbal. That herbal note is where it starts going downhill. To expand: twigs, waxy leaves, pollen. Finish is mild baking spices. The cherry here turns to cough syrup. The herbal: mint, formaldehyde. That minty cough syrup sticks around, like peat does on Lagavulin. It’s not great. It shows the same promise as main line Ancient Age, but it gets funky toward the end of the sip. I think that funk is what (with age) BT manages to extract some really great stuff in the mid shelf mashbill 2s, particularly Blanton’s. But at this production level it’s whacked out, and I prefer the purity of the Ancient Age, where you get a cheap version of that good good MB2 without adding in the funky stuff. I am sipping veggie NyQuil.