When Trey Zoeller started working in the liquor business in the 1990s, he was surprised to find that, outside of his home state of Kentucky, nobody wanted bourbon. “Everybody drank bourbon here and I never thought about it—I assumed they drank bourbon everywhere,” he said. “Then I moved to a half dozen different places around the country and nobody was drinking it.”

Why, then, did he decide to start a bourbon business in 1999, a year when bourbon sales were, to put it bluntly, in the toilet?

For one thing, he could get good bourbon cheaply. There were just eight distilleries operating in Kentucky, replete with well-aged barrels from the so-called glut era of the 1980s, but “we could buy from anyone,” Zoeller recalled. He also believed that bourbon had the potential to achieve the same high prices that scotch and Irish whiskeys were starting to command.

“Ignorance is bliss,” he laughed. “There wasn't a high-end [bourbon] market or consumer at the time, but I had confidence that what was out there, some of the great old barrels, were superior to things that were being bottled—and that there's always room at the top. Maybe that was a little bit before our time because we couldn't give it away in the beginning.” 

Sales were so poor in the early days that Zoeller had to diversify, so he shilled energy drinks, fortified water, and even a Chardonnay called Pinque. Those products outsold Jefferson’s for years, helping to sustain Zoeller’s faith that, eventually, whiskey drinkers would come around. “I should have concentrated more effort on those products than bourbon, because it wasn't paying the bills at the time,” he said.

Eventually his passion project paid off. Early bottlings of Jefferson’s Presidential Select, originally priced at $100 and containing Stitzel-Weller bourbon, now command thousands of dollars at auction. Though his initial supply of glut-era barrels has long since been exhausted, Zoeller has been shrewd about laying down new make on contract and buying whiskey from different distilleries, all with an eye toward finishing and blending. It’s this post-distillation process that defines Jefferson’s rather than what happens in the stillhouse.

Over the years, Zoeller hasn’t shied away from aggressive barrel finishes, and he’s made waves—literally—with products like Jefferson’s Ocean, a bourbon aged onboard active container ships that some commentators in the past have dismissed as a gimmick. The brand now has a deep bench of everyday whiskeys, as well as a luxury offering in Marian McClain, a five-bourbon blend named for an early American distiller and ancestor of Zoeller. As part of the Castle Brands portfolio, Jefferson’s was acquired by Pernod Ricard in 2019. The company is building a distillery in Lebanon, Kentucky that Zoeller says should come on line sometime later this year. 

Many in Zoeller’s position would have retired at this point, but he’s still full of energy and ideas—and looking at potentially bringing his children, twins who recently turned 21, into the business in the future. Even with bourbon’s 21st-century momentum starting to slow, he sees plenty of opportunity ahead. The Unicorn Review sat down with Zoeller to talk about the bourbon community, the roots of his experimental philosophy, and more—including an as-yet-unreleased collaboration with an A-list rock star. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Unicorn Review: There are a number of whiskey blenders making a good name for themselves nowadays, but that wasn’t the case when you got started. Did you consciously avoid talking about blending? 

Trey Zoeller: We didn't beat our chest about it, that's for sure, because you're exactly right: blending was bad. It was a dirty word. People associated it with blended scotch whisky, blended Canadian whiskies. What we were doing was blending Kentucky straight bourbon whiskeys— great products all the way around—and just trying to put them together to make them better than they were. We started doing it way before most had even thought about it. If there were other distilleries doing it, they weren't talking about it. 

Now people are putting more weight and more credit into blending. I think there's a real art to it. It's the hardest product. We’ve done 30 expressions, and we've got four blended products now. Those are the ones that are still the most difficult to put together because there's one way to do it—that's by taste. 

You told me once that distilling is not what’s interesting to you. It’s maturation and what you can do with the whiskey afterwards. Where does that philosophy come from?

When I started, 99% of bourbon was made in Kentucky. If you look at the history, then you understand why they distill and age the way they do, which is all borne out of practicality. So I looked at it as: if you threw practicality out the door, what could you do to enhance bourbon the most?

So Marian McLain, my eighth-generation grandmother, was arrested for not paying taxes. After the Revolutionary War, George Washington had to pay for the war, so he instituted the whiskey tax. A lot of the distillers [from the East] went over the Appalachian Mountains and started distilling in this region. To get the whiskey back to where there were people, they put it in barrels for the first time. They floated it down the river system and then shipped it around Florida, back up to where there were people. 

I recreated that [journey] 10, 12 years ago, and the whiskey that we distilled and sent on that voyage was unbelievable. It was as dark as the 16-year-old bourbon that we double-barreled for five years. Completely complex, so much more rounded than the same whiskey distilled on the same day and aged in Kentucky. 

Then the railroad made its way down to Kentucky and you could ship barrels of whiskey up to New York in two weeks. Two-week-old whiskey sucks. So what did they do? They built warehouses right next to the distillery, built them high rather than wide, and aged it year over year over year to catch up to what happened on that voyage. 

I looked at it and said, what changed on that voyage? It was environment and agitation. If you change the environment and agitation, you can drastically change the outcome of the whiskey. So I started experimenting in those different routes and that really opened up to what I could do. 

Jefferson’s Ocean is tremendously impacted by its sea voyage, but I still see people casually dismissing it as a gimmick. They don’t understand what’s happening to the barrel when it gets loaded onto a ship. What do you say to the haters?

It's really interesting that they dismiss that, but they buy into Warehouse J or Warehouse G [as influencing flavor in specific ways due to their location]. You've been to Kentucky—no microclimates here. It's either blanketed in heat and humidity or it's cold as shit. So is there really a difference between one warehouse and another? Maybe so—if so, slightly. 

But let's say you take a barrel out of that warehouse and you put it on a ship and it's rocking back and forth and you take it down to the Tasmanian Sea and all the way up to the North Sea and cross the equator. If you can't [believe] that that matures bourbon in a different way than it would from one warehouse to another, then you've lost the ability to rationalize.

Your early Presidential Select bottles were $100 at time of release. Now they’re selling for thousands at auction. Did you ever expect that?

We had a hard time selling for a hundred bucks. I would’ve held a lot more of it back if I knew that was going to be the case. I was just happy to sell what we had. 

Most people would say it was a perfect storm of things coming together that finally made bourbon take off, from the economy to Mad Men to cocktail culture. If you ask me, this [holds up phone] is what it was. 

Once people could geek out together and to form a community together, that's when bourbon really started to take off. But at the time, the collectability of bourbon wasn't a thing. Nobody anticipated any of that—I certainly didn't. It's the community of bourbon that has made it proliferate so much, which is such a great, cool thing about it.

Have you ever seen people trying to sell fake Jefferson’s, refilled bottles or something like that?

I've seen empty bottles for sale on the internet, so I can only assume. 

When I first got into the industry, and I'm talking 1997, I remember being with a distributor in Nashville and seeing people recork wine bottles. It totally blew my mind. I couldn't believe that was going on, and it was going on in the open in front of a number of people. I'd be naive to think it doesn't happen. 

I've seen bottles that we've only sold overseas end up in the U.S. I assume that's how they got there, but I'm not positive. So I think unfortunately it happens, but I guess that's just a sign of the success of the category or the brand. When we started doing some releases and seeing how many people were lined up there knowing that 50% of them were buying it only to flip it—you hate to see that, but it's indicative of the success of the category. 

You’ve been at this for almost 30 years. In the next 30 years, do you think bourbon can establish itself internationally as a whiskey that’s as well known and respected as scotch?

Absolutely. When I first went to the first WhiskyFest in New York [in the late 1990s], us bourbon companies were pushed in the corner. We were the redheaded stepchild. Nobody was there to talk bourbon. It was all about scotch. 

It's an education process. I don't think that we have properly pushed bourbon out into the world with as much emphasis as we should. In my mind, it's all about prestige and status that bourbon has not done a good enough job establishing. So I think absolutely it can be and will be more and more accepted. If you go to South America and Asia, scotch is king just as it was here in the ‘90s. There will be a time and a place that shift happens, and it will happen rapidly like it did here. When that happens, I don't know. 

Do you ever lose track of your experiments?

We’re much better at [keeping track] now that we’re part of Pernod Ricard. That said, I've got a number of experiments that I would love to bring to market. It's just how you can only bring so much to market at a time. We've got some unbelievable products that we've done in very small amounts that I would now like to do in commercial bottlings. That’s one of the fights that I have with the bigger company all the time. I want to put these out and they're like, hold on, let's have a more planned out release for them and space it out a little bit more.

In 2019, you told me you were shipping bourbon over to Il Palagio, Sting’s wine estate in Tuscany. What happened with that?

It wasn’t enough for a commercial release. That’s one of those products I’d love to come out with. It’s got all the right components: different climate, a building to age it, which is perfect. We do have one obstacle to overcome, which was the legality of what we were doing. How to get it there. I’ve got to figure that out.