The Man Behind Jefferson's Bourbon Shares What the Next Limited Releases Will Be

Trey Zoeller has the sun-darkened face of a man who has put his mouth where his money is. The Kentucky-born-and-bred 55-year-old founded Jefferson’s Bourbon with his father Chet in 1997, leading to a career pushing the boundaries of bourbon into new territory (one bottle even landed on Men's Journal's best whiskeys in the world list). Sipping from tumblers on the bank of Rock Creek at the luxury dude ranch that shares the waterway's name, surrounded by 6,000 pristine private acres of Montana Big Sky country near Philipsburg, a dozen ranch guests hang on Zoeller’s words during the annual Whiskey and Water weekend at The Ranch at Rock Creek.

Related: The 15 Best Scotch Whiskies of 2024

“Back when I started Jefferson’s, bourbon was uncool,” says Zoeller in his gravelly Southern accent. “It was your grandfather’s drink.” If you went to a bar anywhere outside Kentucky, he recalls, the only bourbon you’d find is Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, and Maker’s Mark. It was the era of Cosmos, Zimas, and Absolut-anything—meaning there was vast bourbon inventory available for purchase for anyone with the gumption to ask, simply because the consumer demand just wasn’t there.

It was around that time, the mid-'90s, that Zoeller noticed an ad in an in-flight magazine offering barrels of Irish whiskey for sale, and thought: “If we can buy a barrel from Ireland, why can’t we buy one from our friends in Kentucky? You can’t throw a rock without hitting a distillery.” So he asked, and some of these distilleries said they’d sell him anything he wanted. His first purchase was 400 of the last barrels distilled at the Stitzel-Weller distillery—which also made Pappy Van Winkle at the time. At one point, Zoeller says that Julian Van Winkle III, grandson to “Pappy” himself, called and asked if he could buy it back. “Sure,” Zoeller replied drolly. “One bottle at a time.”

Related: I Helped Review Hundreds of Whiskeys. This Cheap Bourbon Is My New Favorite.

From those early days, Zoeller put his own stamp on bourbon with artful blending techniques. Back then, blending was more about quality control and uniformity. Zoeller acted more like a winemaker than a distiller, cherry picking different bourbons and blending them together to create the perfect flavor profile. In the world of Scotch and Japanese whisky, there was already a precedent for elevating master blenders. But in Kentucky, Zoeller’s bourbon-making method was novel.

He’d soon depart even further from Kentucky bourbon tradition. Zoeller tested out creative cask finishes, which had only just been introduced to Scotch in the 1980s—and that were still decades from becoming mainstream marketing buzzwords. Zoeller went on to age whiskey in rum casks, cognac casks, cabernet casks, and (even though you’ll never see them on store shelves) tobacco barrels and Tabasco hot sauce barrels. He’s sent bourbon barrels to every corner of the globe to experiment with weather, humidity, and agitation, putting casks through typhoons, hurricanes, bitter cold, and stifling heat. His methods, which once raised eyebrows, have since been adopted by the bourbon old guard. Now, many bourbon brands tout a new cask finish every few months, and Zoeller has shifted from outlier to insider, evidenced by his induction to the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame alongside his father, who himself has authored multiple books on bourbon history.

Related: 15 Best Japanese Whiskies of 2024 for Cocktails or Sipping

Zoeller doesn’t intend to shed the defiant spirit that got him where he is any time soon. Since global liquor company Pernod Ricard purchased Jefferson's in 2019, Zoeller is getting a new $270-million distillery of his own, allowing him control of the entire whiskey-making process—with freedom to experiment even further. He hasn’t lost the rebel edge in his voice either, ending the tasting with a raised glass and the words, “Thank you all for listening to my bullshit. Got any questions?”

I do. But I'll ask them while knee-deep in nearby Rock Creek while wearing fly-fishing waders and casting flies for local trout next to Zoeller. In between tips on finding the best fishing holes and presenting flies in the most natural way, while hauling trout out of the water, he tells me more about his experience as a bourbon trailblazer.

Men’s Journal: Why do you focus on finishing and maturation rather than on grain terroir, mash bill, or even distillation?

Trey Zoeller: Wine is all about terroir, but when you distill whiskey at 160-proof, you distill those nuances out. But when you change the environment that you age it in, you’re able to change the whiskey in the barrel. By forcing myself to go to cool places and taste these barrels year after year, I’ve seen some vastly different things. It’s almost like raising a kid in a different environment. It's born with the same science of distillation, with the same DNA, and yet it can become so different.

What have you found makes the biggest change in a whiskey?

Different climates and environments—plus the agitation.

Are there any new Jefferson's expressions in the works that you can tell us about?

We've got a number of barrels in different climates around the world. Some of them are in the tropics—Singapore was the first iteration of Jefferson's Tropics line—but we've learned a lot from Whisky Ridge right here. High desert certainly gives very distinguishable tastes and flavors, so we'll look at that as well. The more extreme the weather, the better. Except when you say Antarctica. When you get that cold, you arrest the maturation, so it's dormant. But extremes do really well. Depending on the environment, either you’ll have the alcohol or the water burning off first, which increases or decreases the proof. In an arid climate like this, the water burns off first, which increases the proof. So, you're gonna get spicier and oakier flavors. If you like that flavor normally, this would be that on steroids.

Will these experiments be a part of blends or dedicated bottlings?

Dedicated bottlings. We can do a very small run, then we'll go ahead and send more barrels, like we did to Singapore—where we sent 780 of them. We don't have nearly that many here now, but we've got enough for a good experiment. We want to prove it out before we send too much.

Are you sending one control sample, or multiple spirits?

I'm trying to do a constant, so I can use that as the control. From the time that we send those off, I’ve taken some whiskey out of the wood and into the air. I taste the control, as well as some that were sitting right next to those barrels in Kentucky that didn't go on the journey—so I can really see the difference. And then we take them back to the lab and break them down and see what happened from a molecular standpoint.

What's the longest you've left something out in the wild?

Seven years. One's in a duck blind in the Mississippi Delta and another is in a duck blind in Virginia. The extreme hot and cold really beats the shit out of those barrels. We’ve repaired them a couple times, but I don’t think we can leave them out there any longer at this point.

Do you have more attrition with barrels than most bourbon brands?

Yeah, that’s just the cost of what we do. Our evaporation in Singapore was huge. That makes for bad yields, but improved whiskey. So, it's one of the reasons the cost is high—because 40% of your barrel evaporates out.

If you get a leak in a warehouse, you can repair that. In a shipping container, you can't. As soon as they leave our place and we get them into the shipping containers, they're locked up. And they're not unlocked until they come back. We've been stuck in the Panama Canal a couple times, and they thought we had a hazmat issue because there was liquid leaking out and they didn’t know what it was. Now we have absorbing blankets at the bottom of the containers.

Are you further along the learning curve of ocean-aging than everyone else at this point?

If we’re talking about [Norwegian spirits company] Linie Aquavit, they’ve been doing it for a long time. But if we’re talking the whiskey realm, yes. There are a couple other people that have sent a Scotch back and forth, and a Japanese whisky. It accelerates maturation. But what we're trying to do is enhance it, not necessarily accelerate it—and you're certainly not trying to cheat it. So, we push the boundaries, yet always tip our hat to tradition. The youngest whiskey we work with is four years old, but most of it's at least six years old. I think the honey spot is six to eight years old for bourbon. That way, it's fully matured in Kentucky, but if it's aged over that, whatever I'm doing to manipulate it afterwards isn't overpowering.

Related: 50 Best Whiskeys in the World

How many expressions are in your core range?

We can have eight on the shelf at all times, which is a lot. I have this argument with Pernod Ricard all the time. For their sales force, they've got about eighty brands. Of those brands, they have four expressions each—and I want to have at least eight. They think that's too much to manage, but I think our customers want variety. So, it's a balance.

Where do you want Jefferson’s Bourbon to be five years from now?

I want it to be one of the globally recognized and admired brands on the scale of The Macallan. Something that people put all the way at the top. What we’ve done is take other people's distillate—and now our own—and put more time, money, and effort in to improve it. I don't think there's any reason why ours shouldn't be at the top.

Until the new distillery opens, how much control do you have over distilling and maturation?

They make a specific recipe for me, put it in specific barrels at a specific time, and pull it out at our proof. Then I take that and try to massage to hopefully make it better. At the end of every tasting, I say, “Raise your hand for who likes this”—and it's almost always a scattering of equal hands that go up for each expression. I think that's great. Like Baskin-Robbins, you've got 31 flavors for a reason. What you like and what I like probably aren't exactly the same thing and shouldn't be. Your palate has had a very different journey than mine. Maybe you grew up in Louisiana, liking things I was never exposed to. I roll my eyes at these guys who look down upon someone who mixes bourbon with Coke. Maybe it's just different phases of different journeys. The first time you have cask-strength bourbon, you might not like it. You’ve got to wade into it—and ultimately enjoy it however you want. You bought it, so do what you want with it.

When you educate people on Jefferson's, what is the biggest surprise for most people?

That they can taste the flavors I'm describing. What I really try to do is put stories in bottles. So, when they share it with somebody, they can tell the story of why it tastes the way it does. When you can articulate that, then you can taste it and you can understand it. Most people don't think about it that deeply. It's just bottled-up whiskey. Half the people at the tasting yesterday probably didn't know that it went into the barrel colorless. But if I can tell them that we put it on this ship and the salt air permeates it and the heat caramelizes the sugar, they think, “Salted caramel—okay, I get that.” Or that we slow cook the sugars in the wood by leaving it in Singapore, in that heat for that long, then people can understand why those flavors come out the way they do: caramelized pecans.

How do Kentucky's bourbon traditionalists respond to your unique approach?

You’ve got some naysayers who'll say "that's not traditional bourbon" if you're taking it outside traditional aging techniques—or over to Singapore. On the other hand, people really geek out about microclimates within a warehouse. So, if there's really a magic spot 100 yards from another warehouse—and within that, an even smaller magic spot—why wouldn't these extreme different climates where we take our bourbons work?

We backed it up with science by sending it off to independent labs and having it analyzed and broken down molecularly. Anytime you're the first to do something, there's people ready to knock you down. We're now on our 30th voyage—and the number two selling bourbon at $70 and above. Blanton's took a price increase to knock us off number one. So, a lot of people have bought in and opened their minds to it.

A great example is our Pritchard Hill finish. I had a real bourbon geek friend from Kentucky who came to me and said, "Trey, the first time I tried this I absolutely hated it, but it's now my favorite bourbon.” When he first tasted it, he said it was like going to the drive-thru at McDonald's, ordering a Coke, taking a sip out of the straw, and getting iced tea instead. It wasn't what he expected. But once he sat down to give it a chance and explore all the different flavors, he fell in love with it.

What's the main thing you want people to know about Jefferson’s Bourbon?

If you give it the opportunity, you'll find one you like. We're not just throwing things at the wall and trying to see what sticks. I’m coming up with ideas based on all the experiences that I've had in the past. They're not developed in the boardroom by saying, “We need to do this at these price points.” Rather, “What else can we do that might push them farther?”

Related: 20 Best Bourbons for an Old Fashioned, Tasted and Reviewed