Jeffersons Reserve Very Old, Very Small Batch Kentucky Straight Bourbon
Jeffersons Reserve Very Old is a rich, mature, 90.2 proof Kentucky straight bourbon blended from as few as eight barrels. It is one of the best bourbon gifts you can give without spending three figures. It is the bottle for the bourbon lover who has moved past the obvious names. It drinks like it costs a great deal more than it does.
Jeffersons was founded in 1997 by Trey Zoeller and his father Chet, a bourbon historian. The family credentials go back a long way further than that. Trey traces his whiskey lineage to an eighth generation grandmother. She was arrested in 1799 for the production and sale of spirituous liquors. It is a family that has been in trouble over bourbon for more than two centuries.
The house is a blending house, and that is the craft here. Rather than chasing a single distillate, Jeffersons selects mature Kentucky barrels and marries them. Reserve is where that skill shows most clearly. It is built from four different bourbons of different ages, blended together. The batch is genuinely small, eight to twelve barrels. For scale, plenty of bourbons labelled small batch are drawn from two or three hundred. Very small batch, in this case, means what it says.
What makes it exceptional:
- Blended from just eight to twelve barrels, a genuinely very small batch.
- Four different bourbons of different ages, married together by hand.
- Bottled at 90.2 proof, notably richer and stronger than the standard Jeffersons.
- Honey and nutmeg on the nose, then caramel, toffee and cinnamon, finishing on leather and tobacco.
- Double Platinum at the 2022 Ascot Awards and Gold at the 2022 John Barleycorn Awards.
Jeffersons is also the house that refuses to sit still. It is the brand that puts barrels of bourbon onto ships and ages them at sea. The ships cross the equator. The motion of the ocean and the swings in temperature drive the whiskey harder into the wood. Reserve is the classic, grown up expression from a house that is famous for experimenting. That combination of restraint and curiosity is what bourbon people love about it.
Serve it neat or over a single large cube. At 90.2 proof it has real weight without needing to be tamed. It is exactly the sort of bottle a bourbon drinker will quietly finish faster than they expected.
It is a natural for Fathers Day, a groomsman gift, or a birthday. It also works as a thank you to someone who knows their bourbon. You can tuck in a personalized note during checkout.
