I had the opportunity to sample this gem of a bourbon at breakeven price. It smells mild, delicate, and demure, like vanilla cream soda in a musty revered library. But the flavor is incredible: it seems to linger eternal, but it’s mutable and implacable as a chameleon: now searingly spicy, now honey-sweet, now fresh, now tasting of vanilla, now of menthol, always on a sea of oak, oak, oak. It’s a Willy Wonka jawbreaker of a whiskey; you could enjoy it for hours without boredom. Was it worth trying? Absolutely. And while it’s thr archetype of all things bourbon, I don’t feel it ruined future whiskies for me.