Back in the 1980s when I went to college in Northern California, you didn’t have to be a billionaire to own property in wine country — especially in the Healdsburg area, as opposed to neighboring Sonoma and Napa. In those days, wine-tasting trips were less about fancy facilities and luxury restaurants and more about driving down a gravel road to knock on a screen door to ask farmers what they were working on.
The same people who grew the grapes made the wine, and after a tasting, you might buy a couple of bottles, head to the local store for some bread and cheese and make a picnic out of it. The idea of an estate wine was sort of the norm with grapes harvested in situ and used to make wine that was truly descriptive of the land they grew on. As California wines became more popular, larger operations depended on growers to provide them with fruit to feed demands that far outstripped what they could grow on their own property. This made true “estate wines” even rarer and more sought after.
In the world of whiskey, estate products are even rarer. It takes a couple hundred pounds of grain to make a single barrel of whiskey. To put that another way: about 800 square feet to grow the corn, barley, rye and/or wheat to mix with water to create a mash that eventually ferments and is distilled into whiskey. And it’s not like you can immediately reuse that growing space to make another bottle — that’s it for the season, until your next crop is ready for harvest.
So distilling is primarily dependent on large-scale grain producers who can deliver consistent shipments of raw materials to storage silos and bins at distilleries. Almost nobody tries to make whiskey with grain that they grew themselves. Almost nobody.
Jeptha Creed is a relatively young distillery in Shelbyville, Ky., between Louisville and Lexington. The family business is managed by master distiller Joyce Nethery and her daughter Autumn, who runs the marketing side of the business. Husband Bruce is also integral to the business as the farmer who manages the 64 acres surrounding the distillery, as well as close to 1,000 acres elsewhere in Shelby County.
Together, the family distills and sells a selection of bourbons, vodka, moonshine and brandy, but the product that really excited me was their special 100-proof Red, White & Blue Straight Bourbon. While there is certainly a patriotic bent to that name, it primarily refers to the fact that Jeptha Creed uses three different colors of heirloom corn in the mash bill along with malted barley and malted rye. That last ingredient is actually the result of a mistaken delivery, since rye is rarely malted for use in whiskey, but the Netherys actually preferred it and left it in the recipe.
The corn blend is 25 percent Bloody Butcher red corn, 25 percent heirloom white Hickory King and 25 percent Bruce’s Blue, a special hybrid that the family developed on the farm by crossing Blue Clarage Dent Corn with Hopi Blue Corn. The remaining percentages are 20 percent rye and 5 percent barley.
All the corn for Red, White & Blue is grown on the distillery property, making this about as close to an estate whiskey as you can get. (Since the barley and rye have to come from a malting house anyway, it just makes sense to source them directly.) Because the Netherys cannot order these corns from anywhere else, they have to keep a two-year supply on hand, and luckily they can still grow more than they can distill.
Although Red, White & Blue could qualify as a bottled-in-bond product thanks to its age and proof level, the fact that Jeptha Creed bottles it twice a year for releases around July 4 and Veteran’s Day means that some of the barrels in the blend come from different distilling seasons, which is a violation of the arcane rules of BiB. No matter — this is a damned fine whiskey, regardless of what you call it!.
This is Batch 3 of the RWB project, a blend of 50-60 barrels aged at least five years. Bright copper-colored and shimmering in the glass, the bourbon offers a lot of citrus and vanilla on the nose. The first sip hits with strong vanilla and cinnamon notes, like a buttery slice of cinnamon toast. Then the earthiness of the Bloody Butcher begins to evolve over the course of a long finish that fades to a nutty, leathery conclusion. The inclusion of the malted rye (and perhaps those unfamiliar corn varieties) contributes to a lush and rich mouth feel.
Retailing at around $70 a bottle, Jeptha Creed Red, White & Blue (Batch 3) is a premium whiskey, but certainly not in the outrageous range. Even better, some of the proceeds from this particular batch go to help CreatiVets, a Nashville-based organization that helps veterans deal with PTSD, depression and other side-effects of combat stress through music and visual arts, so your purchase helps out a local nonprofit at the same time.
Bruce Nethery didn’t even start out wanting to grow corn. He was a dairy farmer until he realized that his feed costs were higher than his milk income. It didn’t take long to do the math to see where the profits might lie, and by converting that corn into fine whiskey like Jeptha Creed Red, White & Blue, the Netherys are turning their family’s entrepreneurial spirit into something a heckuva lot more interesting.
