Here’s what I can tell you about Jefferson’s that will intrigue you.
When you go to the Kentucky Artisan Distillers site, there’s a tour of the distillery and the bottling line where many brands (not just Jefferson’s) are dumped, vatted, and put into glass. The Pinhook Vertical Series 7 year old was being bottled as we walked through the facility and there was some Cream of Kentucky lined up as well. While the Jefferson’s distillery has a pot and column hybrid like some of the other small Kentucky producers, none of that juice has been bottled for public consumption under the Jefferson’s label. That detail will be relevant as we get to the barrel tasting.
Before tasting through the available single barrels, I asked Jefferson’s Chief Barrel Officer Dan Burke if we could walk through the warehouse where the barrels are matured to get a sense of their operation. We hiked through the lush green trees that separate the tasting room from the rickhouses and proceeded to tour the buildings. This is where things get interesting if you’re someone who likes to know where your whiskies come from.
I didn’t ask permission to share the information I gleaned from walking through the warehouse, so I won’t be posting any specifics here. What I will say is that a great number of the barrels from the Jefferson’s rickhouses have tags on them. Those tags also designate which brands own which barrels, so you can easily tell which barrels are owned by Jefferson’s specifically and which are being stored for other brands. Based on the tags I saw under the Jefferson’s lot, I couldn’t wait to head back into the tasting room for our single barrel sampling.
While the Jefferson’s Reserve is a marriage of four different Bourbons, the single barrel selections (bottled at 100 proof) are taken from a single distillery. According to Dan, one particular distillery makes up 65% of the Jefferson’s Reserve Blend with the other 3 comprising the remaining 35%. All of the single barrels Jefferson’s allocates to retailers come from that 65%. I can’t say for certain what that majority Bourbon is because it’s a proprietary secret. All I can do is deduce from what I saw in the rickhouse based on which distillery made up the lion’s share of casks.
Even if I’m wrong with that educated guess, the barrels I saw came from the best distilleries in Kentucky. The barrel we picked was more than six years of age and it wasn’t distilled in Indiana, so you can narrow it down from there.
-David Driscoll