Evan Williams seems to play up the annual "vintages" aspect of its Single Barrel offering, but tastings across a few years--2002, 2003, 2004--reveal a pretty consistent bourbon, a straightforward bourbon-drinker's bourbon: cream soda, BBQ'd corn on the cob, cinnamon, faint cocoa, tobacco, oak, caramel. Some fresh fruit--apples, berries--and a kind of Kool-Aid grape-drink-type flavour I often get from Heaven Hill whiskeys. Sweetness, caramel, vanilla on the taste, then tobacco, honey, light citrus and tobacco. A hint of fresh-cut lumber. Drying, wood, grass, baking spices and wood-smoke on the finish. This is not, to my tastebuds, an absolute world-class bourbon. But it is a solid baseline bourbon, widely available at a good price, and it hits the marks of what a good, straightforward bourbon should do. A reliable old friend.