Little break from the single casks. OK so this is a single barrel, 4698, bottled 7/30/2019. 130 bucks and required me to spend 900 at the store for the right. I've had some great EC18's so I went into this pretty excited. I'll go back to this after my notes but I did a blind tasting of this vs 2 knob creeks (the new 12 year, review coming, and a 9 year store pick). I'll save you the spoiler but it wasn't a good result. Nose - I think the whisky shines here. There's a lot of oak, vanilla, it's dry, a bit spicy, but there's a funky oak note here. I'm not sure that'll go over with everyone. Taste - The problem with the taste is that funk on the nose is all over the flavor. There's so much oak here and not a nice sweet fruity oak. Not a nice inviting one, but just funky dried up oak. Still, there's vanilla, caramel, light spice, a bit of sour dough perhaps. What's confusing me is that on past 18's have gotten so much fruit and all these nice flavors and here the oak is a bit over the top, but it's not the oak that's ruining this. It's the lack of other flavors. This is an uncorking and as such I'm super hopeful this will change in the bottle, but so far...this is not doing it for me. 1.75 stars. I don't think most people will enjoy this bottle as it is. I however don't think this is bad whisky, it's got some stuff going on and I"m hopeful it opens up into a better but still disappointing bottle.