BY JACQUELINE DETWILERT H E GR E AT
WHISKEY EXPERIMENT
If you ship whiskey on a river like they did in the 1800s, does it taste better?
THERE’S AN OLD STORY in the
whiskey world: Before trucks
and bottling lines, all American
whiskey was aged and shipped in barrels,
soaking up lavor as it sloshed down the
Mississippi River. Eventually, people took
a particular liking to the barrels marked
“Bourbon County, Kentucky.” They started
clamoring for “bourbon.” And that’s how
that whole thing got started.
Trey Zoeller, the cofounder of Jeferson’s
Bourbon and a man with an experimental
streak as wide as a barn door, wondered if
something had gotten lost in the decades of
progress that followed. “In my mind, bour-
bon proliferated in Kentucky because of
the route to market and not, as most people
claim, the limestone water,” says Zoeller.
To test that theory, two years ago he sent
two barrels of Jeferson’s signature spirits
along a traditional bourbon shipping route,
down the Ohio River to the port of New
Orleans and then into the Atlantic and up
to New York City.
The day he arrived in Manhattan to
taste it, he brought the irst sample, alongwith a control batch from Louisville, to
Popular Mechanics. The whiskey that took
the trip, which Zoeller calls Jeferson’s
Journey, was mature beyond its age, richer,
with new lavors of tobacco, vanilla, car-
amel, and honey. It was some of the best
bourbon any of us had ever drunk.
To see if something had changed, on
a molecular level, in the Journey to make
it taste better, we partnered with Good
Housekeeping Institute chemical engineer
Birnur Aral and scientists at Jordi Labs in
Mansield, Massachusetts. PHOTOGRAPH BY STUART TYSON32 JULY/AUGUST _ 201 POPULARMECHANICS.COM