Aged-at-sea is the wild story behind Jefferson’s Ocean Bourbon, an extremely limited, hard-to-find run of only 600 bottles. Jefferson’s founder/brandmaster Trey Zoeller (below), continuing in the family Kentucky bourbon business, decided to go less traditional by placing several oak barrels of his finest on the deck of friend Chris Fischer’s shark-chasing research ship, the M.V. Ocean (as in National Geographic’s Shark Men reality show), to see what would happen. For nearly four years, there they stood, absorbing what the Pacific had to offer: extreme temperature changes, pounding sun, salt water baths from swells on deck, constant rocking, the salty sea air. Accelerated aging was the result: rich amber, complex, syrupy, rivaling 20-year-olds…a success. Jefferson’s is a Very Small Batch producer of handcrafted Kentucky bourbon, working with only 8-12 barrels at a time. Proceeds from the even more limited edition Ocean go to Fischer’s Ocearch shark research non-profit. Cheers!