Emerging from the marshes to the north, a small motorboat cruises into New Orleans’ Lake Pontchartrain, travelling 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 ageing metal—belies the value of its cargo: Two 53-gallon oak barrels of bourbon. As well as the novelty of its journey from Louisville, Kentucky, 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 savour 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 colour 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 and founded in 1997. 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.
In this century, Jefferson’s continues to break the rules, excelling at the innovative flourishes that liquor companies need to come up with to survive competition. Fine bourbon is well-aged bourbon, and on a whim Zoeller began experimenting with ageing by stashing barrels (he also prefers Cabernet casks from Napa Valley’s well-regarded Groth Vineyard) in duck blinds to expose them to changing weather. His bourbon boats are another iteration of that philosophy.
Almost all whiskey—whether scotch, bourbon or rye—ages in barrels indoors. The process takes years, and the longer, the better. It favours big distilleries with the warehouses to handle mass quantities and the facilities to fine-tune elements like humidity and temperature to hone small-batch whiskeys. To stand out, smaller brands like Jefferson’s must get creative.
(This story appears in the 11 November, 2016 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)