From its earliest days as America's homegrown whiskey elixir, Kentucky bourbon has been traveling on boats. In fact, boats were a key reason why Kentucky became the king of bourbon. In the late 1700s, trade depended on waterways, and distillers in the state had a big advantage: the Ohio River. They'd load their barrels onto flatboats on the Ohio, which flowed into the Mississippi, taking their golden liquor as far down as New Orleans. Back then, placing barrels on boats was a necessity. These days, it's become a novelty: Eighth-generation Kentucky bourbon distiller Trey Zoeller is using the motion of the ocean to produce bottles worth $200 each. "We're going back to how bourbon was initially aged," Zoeller tells The Salt. "The color and flavor came from the rocking on the water. Bourbon was loaded on to ships in Kentucky, and by the time it travelled to the people buying it, the flavor improved." Bourbon is a family legacy for Zoeller. His great-great-great grandmother was among the first female distillers and his father, Chet, is a bourbon scholar.
Zoeller has been in the artisanal whiskey business since the 1990s with his Jefferson's Bourbon. Five years ago, Zoeller was celebrating his birthday on a friend's boat off the coast of Costa Rica. As two Kentucky boys are wont to do, they were raising glasses full of bourbon. That's when Zoeller got the idea to send barrels of bourbon out to sea. "I was watching the bourbon in the bottle shift from side to side," he recalls, "and I thought, if it'll do that in the bottle, it'll do that in a barrel on a ship." Chemist Tom Collins, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, who has analyzed the flavor profiles of American whiskeys, says higher temperatures like those found in tropical locales, and the swill of the ocean, can both accelerate the whiskey aging process. "The daily swing in temperature matters," Collins explains. "As the liquid warms up, it expands into the wood. And then as it cools down, it contracts, which can improve extraction" of compounds from the wood – compounds that give aged whiskey its characteristic flavor.
"These reactions are generally favored with higher temperatures." And greater extraction, Collins says, results in more caramel-related compounds, altering the flavor and color of bourbon. After his initial revelation, Zoeller sent five barrels of recently distilled bourbon out to sea with Chris Fischer. A high school friend of Zoeller's, Fischer heads OCEARCH, an organization that tracks sharks and other endangered marine life. He kept the barrels on board his ship for three and a half years. Fischer covered more than 10,000 nautical miles, travelling south of the equator and in and out of the Panama Canal six times. So what happened when Zoeller tapped those first barrels?An Inside-The-Barrel Look At American Whiskeys "The experiment totally exceeded our expectations," he says. "The bourbon went in clear as water and came out black. Bourbon always picks up color in the barrel, but this 4-year-old bourbon was darker than 30-year-old bourbon." And the salt air gave the bourbon a briny taste — more similar to an Irish single malt — and coloring like dark rum, Zoeller says.
The unique combination fuelled a buying frenzy among bourbon enthusiasts. Some paid much as a thousand dollars at auction for a bottle — $800 more than the original selling price. Since those first barrels were shipped out, Zoeller has aged two more generations of his Jefferson's Ocean bourbon on the high seas for roughly three to four years at a time, varying their routes to more than 40 ports — as far north as Scandinavia and south to Africa's Cape of Good Hope. Each batch returns with a different flavor and color. Zoeller now has nearly 200 barrels traversing the globe, with official tasters monitoring the aging process and flavor at various ports along the journey. But how does he ensure that crew members don't sneak their own samples? "We've now got it locked up with cameras monitoring the barrels," he says, "but that doesn't mean they can't outsmart me!"If there's one thing all 21st century wood-workers can claim, it's remarkably good fortune. We have the tools to make the most tedious job effortless and the trickiest joint flawless.
And, anything from glue and lumber to paint and hardware is as close as the nearest home center or only a mouse click away on the Internet. But most of all, we have our legacy of woodworking--hundreds of years of design and wooden construction from which to draw inspiration and on which to base our craft.Sometimes, though, there's a chance to do more than take from our past--we can give something back by rescuing a piece that's seen better days. We had the opportunity to do just that when we discovered this 50-year-old Windsor rocking chair. Even with broken joints and a ruined finish, the chair's classic lines made it an irresistible candidate for restoration. Although the specific procedure we used to bring our rocker back to life might not match your restoration project, there's a good chance many of the techniques will be relevant.Exposure to the elements had ruined many of the glue joints in our chair, but surprisingly, some were still sound. Two failed joints in the seat had left one of the seat boards hanging free, and most of the spindles were no longer securely held in their sockets.
We decided to leave the solid seat and leg joints alone, but we disassembled all the upper spindle joints.To remove a stubborn seat spindle, bore an access hole in the seat bottom to meet the spindle tenon (1).Use a centerpunch and hammer to tap out the piece (2).At the arms, use a nonslip pad to help twist the spindles free (3). Remember to label the pieces for easy reassembly.To restore the failed seat joints, first plane the mating surfaces to provide a good fit (4). Remove only as much material as necessary to avoid affecting the shape of the chair and the fit of the spindle joints.To glue the seat pieces together, first make a clamping caul by tracing the seatback edge on 2 x 4 stock (5). Cut to the line with a sabre saw or band saw.Then, apply glue to the mating surfaces, and use bar or pipe clamps to hold the seat together while the glue sets. Use two waxed 1 x 2 cauls at the top and bottom of the seat at each side to keep the pieces aligned (6).To repair endgrain cracks in seat-joint lines, glue thin, tapered maple wedges in place.
Use a syringe to apply the glue (7).To make very thin wedges for fine checks, tape the wedge to a scrap stick and feather its edge with a file (8).With the seat repairs made, scrape away all old glue from the sockets and disassembled spindles. Be careful not to enlarge the holes or reduce spindle-tenon diameters.Before applying a finish remover, plug all of the spindle holes with corks (9). Packages of corks of various sizes are usually available at hardware stores. Use a hacksaw blade to trim the corks flush (10). Protect the spindle tenons from the finish-stripping operation by wrapping them with masking tape.We used 3M Safest Stripper to remove our chair's finish. Following the manufacturer's instructions, brush on the stripper in heavy coats and allow it to penetrate the old finish (11). To apply stripper to the spindles, bore oversize holes for the spindle tenons in scrap stock to create a convenient benchtop spindle-holding rack (12).Remove the softened finish by gently scraping with a putty knife (13).
Be careful not to gouge the wood surface. Clean the curved surfaces with a flexible stripping pad (14). To clean small grooves in the turned spindles, use a piece of twine that you've coated with dampened pumice (15). Use a small brass-bristle brush in recesses (16). Remove any remaining residue with stripping pads and soapy water, followed by fine stripping pads and clean water.When the wood is dry, lightly sand the chair with 220-grit paper to remove any raised grain that can result from the application of water. We used a 3M sanding sponge on the turned members (17).Remove the cork plugs from the spindle holes and use a belt sander to carefully level the seat repairs (18). In the concave area of the seat, use a curved cabinet scraper to remove any marks or dents (19). Finish sand the seat with a random-orbit sander (20). With the sanding completed, dry assemble the chair to check the fit of all the parts.We used Titebond Extend wood glue for the spindle assembly because of its long open time.
First, apply glue and attach the spindle and arm components to the seat (21). Then, temporarily install the back cross-member, or splat, to keep the long spindles in position while the glue sets.To complete the assembly, apply glue and install the back spindles in the seat. Spread glue on the spindle top tenons and in the splat tenon holes with a small brush (22). Install the splat starting at one end and gradually tilting the other end down as you engage the spindles (23).We used Behlen Solar-Lux American Walnut dye-based stain to color our chair. This is a fast-drying stain, so add 10 percent Solar-Lux Retarder to slow the drying time and help prevent lap marks. Working on one area at a time, apply the stain by wiping it on with a padded cloth (24).For a durable topcoat with just the right sheen, we finished our rocking chair with three coats of Deft Semi-Gloss Clear Wood Finish, applied following the manufacturer's instructions (25). Note that this is a lacquer finish. You must use the product in a well-ventilated area.