The Marco Polo of Bourbon

Jefferson’s has journeyed into uncharted waters in whiskey-making by aging small batches on the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes.

- Abram Brown

Emerging from the marshes to the north, a small motorboat cruises into New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain, traveling at a slow, steady 5 knots through the sticky August air. Steering the vessel is a one-person crew, a young man scruffily bearded after sleeping aboard for almost three months. Once across, the captain anchors along the palm-lined shore facing the city. The craft’s appearance—23 feet of aging metal—belies the value of its cargo: two 53-gallon oak barrels of bourbon. As well as the novelty of its journey from Louisville, Ky., down the Ohio River, then the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico.

After the boat is in port a day or so, its owner, Trey Zoeller, a salt-and-pepper-haired Southerner, arrives to savor a special moment with its captain, Ted Gray. The barrels, secured on deck by steel cages, contain six-month-old whiskey. At that tender age, whiskey is normally as clear as water, tastes overly sweet and singes the palate. Instead, tapping the barrel with a power drill, Zoeller siphons out a liquid with the familiar chestnut color of far older bourbon. After they raise glasses of it to their mouths, the captain finishes Zoeller’s next thought.

“There’s no … ,” Zoeller says.

“… bite at all,” Gray says. 

Zoeller, 48, is the founder of Jefferson’s, a Louisville-based bourbon-maker named for America’s third president (“He embodied both independence and sophistication”) and founded in 1997—before craft whiskey became a national pastime. According to family lore, Zoeller came to whiskey-making naturally enough: He had a truly great grandmother who was a moonshiner in the late 18th century. She was “the first American woman arrested for illegal distilling,” he says proudly.