Aroma opens with red delicious apple, pipe tobacco, wood varnish, leather, sandalwood, and caramel. There’s a significant amount of unwelcome ethanol here. (I know it’s a barrel proof but I’ve had higher proofs with less) This particular release smells closer to a souped-up Elijah Craig Small Batch which…could be better. Palate gets things moving back into the right direction with rich vanilla, Rollo candy, graham cracker pie crust, apple, date, black cherry cola, and milk chocolate. All the notes in the palate are various degrees of sweet, yet it doesn’t become cloying and I would attribute that to the overall profile not being super rich but in this case it might be a feature, not a bug. Finish comes in super quickly with ice cream sundae, cinnamon, clove, oak, and a long spicy blast of peppermint and cinnamon which goes on seemingly forever. While I appreciate long finishes, I’m not certain that these are the notes I want to linger to this extent as there is kind of a toothpaste quality to it. Mouthfeel is weighty and oily, but does have a little graininess. More challenging, less cohesive, and probably just lesser quality than any of the ECBP batches I have sampled. Does that make it a bad whisky? Not at all, and my relatively low rating of 4.0 is less “this is shit whisky” and more indicative of the quality that I am used to seeing from this brand that this one simply didn’t measure up to.