In 1812 ‘Kentucky whiskey’ and ‘western whiskey’ were established commercial terms in the eastern markets. Harrison Hall refers to them under those names in his 1813 instruction manual, The Distiller. Kentucky was corn and western was rye. By 1819 the Port of New Orleans was receiving over 200,000 gallons per month of Kentucky whiskey. Hall wrote in his manual that the mellowing effects of age on whiskey were discovered because the Kentucky product had to wait for the spring rise of the rivers before it could be moved to market, aging while it waited. Then the rocking motion of the boat and the slow trip south improved it even more.

Trey Zoeller, founder of boutique bourbon brand Jefferson’s, knew this probably from his bourbon historian father and was curious about how being on the water might impact his own whiskey so he loaded barrels onto a ship headed around the globe. When he cracked them open three years later the whiskey was dark and thick like a much older bourbon, and tinged with a slight saltiness from its years at sea. Zoeller has now sent two generations of seven- and eight-year-old whiskey to sea for seven months, crossing the equator four times before returning to Kentucky where it’s bottled and branded as Jefferson’s Ocean. 

I recently happened to come across a bottle at my local package store and found it delicious. A friend continues to try to convince me that it’s all marketing but I found the taste to be distinctive from any other bourbon I’ve had (and that’s a lot) – nice caramel and something vaguely undefinable that I choose to call briny.