Jeptha Creed Distillery
By Meghan Swanson
A scientist and former chemistry teacher teams up with a young person just starting to make their way in the adult world, together using their talents to brew and sell a highly valuable substance. Breaking Bad? Absolutely not - this story is a totally legal and wholesome tale of a family finding their way into the bourbon business and creating a brand and product that honors their heritage and showcases their pride in their region and history. The only thing Joyce and Autumn Nethery are breaking at Jeptha Creed in Shelby County, Kentucky, is the glass ceiling.
“The distillery was my husband's idea…he grew up as a dairy farmer. But then he was very entrepreneurial, and started these other businesses that he's still got going on. And he thought a distillery would be a fabulous idea. And I thought it was kind of crazy.” - Joyce Nethery
Joyce earned her master’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Louisville’s Speed Scientific School. For fifteen years she worked as a process engineer, distilling industrial materials like methyl methacrylate and other types of plastics and additives. When her children, Autumn and Hunter, were small, she left her engineering career to take up teaching. Teaching high school chemistry and physics, she comments, “Was quite different; I learned a lot of valuable things teaching.” When her husband, Bruce, started his businesses, she left teaching to become his chief financial officer. “So there I was working in accounts payable and accounts receivable and depreciation schedules, taxes and all these fun and exciting things. That's sarcasm, but they're absolutely 100% necessary.” she says.
“We had a dairy of our own for a while. But there was this point where the feed bill exceeded the revenue from the milk and we're like, no, this can’t continue, it has to stop.” Joyce recalls. “But we kept the farm, we kept the land, we kept the tractors–we still live there, we kept all those other pieces except for the cows and the milk.” she explains. “Now as I look back, it's like…I never made my own cheese. And I'm like, why in the world am I not making my own cheese when I had almost 40 stupid cows!” she exclaims, while Autumn laughs. “For Christmas she asked me for a book on how to make cheese,” Autumn interjects. “I had 40 cows, to get all that raw milk twice a day–and now, I want to make cheese and I don't have a cow.” Joyce laments.
As it turns out, it was a twist of fate–or potentially, the whim of a spouse–that put Joyce’s feet on the path to master distiller instead of cheesemonger. Bruce had floated the idea of a distillery before, and Joyce noticed he would bring it up again from time to time. Clearly, this was a dream he wasn’t going to let get away. “He kept on talking about it. So it got to the point where I was like, he's going to do this thing. And I don't want him to blow himself up, or to go blind.” Joyce explains. “So I found a five day distillers’ course at Moonshine University in Louisville. I got him signed up for it. It just happened to be the very first one, too.” she adds. “And then he couldn’t go.” she finishes.
“I’m fairly certain that he kind of like, made up an excuse not to go. He will neither confirm nor deny this. But the class was in January. And it was very, very cold, and snowy, and gross. And all of a sudden, last-minute he had to go on a trip to Detroit for business.” Autumn explains with a knowing smile. “He knows I’m a tightwad, and I’d already paid for it.” Joyce tells us. “So I had to go!” she sums up. “And I fell back in love with my engineering. And I fell back in love with copper. But the most important thing that came out of that class is the concept of ground-to-glass.” Joyce says. “With my husband's agricultural expertise, and with my engineering, we could grow our own heirloom varietal of corn, and we could distill it and make a beautiful bourbon product. So now, whenever I have to tell that story, I have to say, my husband was right.” she finishes wryly.
“We could grow the corn. We had the agriculture down pat. We could distill it. We had distillation down pat–my mother's got the chemical engineering, she actually worked in distillation, like that part we weren't worried about. We didn't quite have a way to get it out the door yet.” -Autumn Nethery
It was 2013 when Bruce’s last-minute business in Detroit resulted in Joyce’s re-ignited passion for chemistry and the family started talking seriously about starting their own distillery. Autumn was a freshman in college at the time. “I was actually studying film, I wanted to be a filmmaker, make videos, I really loved video editing.” she recalls. “But as I was studying this, I realized that it's going to be very difficult to make that a career long term.” she explains. “So even though I really loved it, I knew it probably wasn't gonna be the right career path for me. So I started looking into other things. And this just so happened to coincide at the same time that my family was starting to talk about putting in a distillery in Shelby County.” she tells us. Fortunately, their home turf is only about 45 minutes away from all the major Kentucky distilleries. During Autumn’s spring break, the family went on tour and visited pretty much all of them. “So it was great, a great way to spend your freshman year, spring break, especially when you couldn't drink. That was fun.” Autumn jokes. “The tastings were always super awkward. Just stand at the back watching everybody drink. Just kind of twiddling your thumbs.” she recalls with a laugh.
It was a welcoming employee at Woodford Reserve that changed things for Autumn forever. “This is back in 2013…so it was before everybody and their mother was on a tour. And you know, you couldn't get into a distillery tour unless you planned three months in advance. And we were the only people on the tour.” she explains. “When the tour guide found out that I was interested in distillation as a career, he really took me under his wing and showed me aspects that they don't normally show on the tour. So as we went through, he would pull people off of the line to talk to me and tell me about their jobs, he actually took us out into the bottling line–which was not normally part of the tour–like, an hour-long tour actually took us two hours.” she tells us. “And that’s where I fell in love with distillation.” she sums up with a smile.
“When we first started the distillery, the idea was that eventually I would be our master distiller. But I was 19–nobody wants to teach you how to make something you're not legally allowed to consume.” Autumn points out. That’s how she ended up enrolling at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. “I moved over there so that I could learn distillation, and I learned a lot of things. Learned that really, to be a master distiller, you need a good grasp on chemistry and biology.” she explains. “Also learned I did not inherit my mother's chemical engineering mind. Chemistry goes in one ear and out the other...it wasn't clicking, as much as I was really trying to make it happen.” she says. In the meantime, she had been studying marketing as a minor; seeing it as an important way to leverage her own natural talents to contribute to the family business, she made it her major and eventually graduated from the University of Kentucky with her bachelor’s degree in marketing.
“Our family has been in Shelby County for 300 years…we've actually been in Shelby County since before Shelby County was a county.” -Autumn Nethery
When the Netherys were working on their distillery dream–before it even had a name–Autumn dove into researching the history of distillation in Shelby County specifically. The Nethery side of the family has ties to the region spanning generations and miles. Autumn’s grandfather moved the family to the farm they live on now; Bruce grew up there, as did Autumn and Hunter in turn. Before that, her great-grandfather and grandfather had hunted on that very same property. In a funny turn of events, when the family purchased property in Southfield, Kentucky, they found out after the fact that Autumn’s great-grandmother grew up on the farm next door. “Didn't even know that when we bought it. It was just kind of an accident. That's how ingrained we are into the community.” Autumn explains proudly.
During the course of her research, she stumbled upon a piece of local history that had nothing at all to do with distillation, but would come to be foundational for the Jeptha Creed brand. Daniel Boone, iconic American folk hero, and his brother Squire Boone were exploring the area that is now Shelby County and discovered it was part of The Knobs, a region in northern Kentucky characterized by scattered, isolated hilltops. The knob they found rises around 300 feet above the surrounding farmland and is the highest point in Kentucky’s Bluegrass Region. The Boone brothers decided to name this impressive landmark Jeptha Knob, after the mighty warrior Jepthah depicted in the book of Judges in the Christian Bible.
Joyce loved the story, and Autumn thought it made perfect sense given she commutes across The Knobs multiple times a day. The other half of the distillery’s name comes from the Nethery family’s dedication to authenticity. “It is so important to us that we literally put it into our name. We chose ‘Creed’ because we wanted to be honest and authentic with our customers about what is going into the spirits that they're drinking.” Autumn explains. In 2016, under Joyce and Autumn’s direction, Jeptha Creed opened its doors.
A creed is defined as a system of religious belief or faith, but can also be defined as a set of beliefs or aims that define one’s actions. Bruce Nethery’s ancestor believed in restoring the senior line of the House of Stuart to the British throne. This led him to fight in the first Jacobite uprising in Scotland. When the uprising failed, King George I’s government sent the Nethery ancestor across the sea to Maryland as an indentured servant as punishment for his treason-disgraced, he had to leave the family crest behind. Three hundred years later, while Autumn was studying in Edinburgh, she tracked down the crest. ‘Ne Oublie’, read the motto beneath; Scottish Gaelic for ‘Never Forget’. “She called home, told her dad about it.” Joyce recalls. “And my husband got literal goosebumps, because he can remember his great grandfather talking to him as a young boy: Don't you forget where you come from.” she remembers.
“Not everybody can say that they are literally ground to glass. Not everybody can say that they quite literally grow the corn on the same property, where they distill, age, bottle, [and] ship out their product. We are able to say that.” -Autumn Nethery
Joyce came out of that five day distillers’ course at Moonshine University with the idea of ground-to-glass distilling burning brightly in her mind. She had already learned of the superior qualities of heirloom vegetation, spurred by her quest for a tastier tomato. “I had started gardening, and found the true importance of those heirloom varietals of vegetables and fruits. And the heirloom tomatoes are where I found that flavor profile that I wanted.” Joyce says. This world of heirloom vegetables is where she found the varietal she terms ‘the’ corn. “I'd seen the bloody butcher corn, and people who were growing it for their own cornbread use.” she explains. “And I thought, well, if it makes good cornbread, it should make good bourbon.” That first year, the family planted a field of bloody butcher next to a non-GMO, standard yellow corn.
One of the things the Netherys enjoy is hunting deer and turkey–the distillery was almost called ‘Rut & Strut’, but the name confused more consumers in the test group than it didn’t–and they watched the way the deer and turkey behaved around the two fields of corn. “We would watch them sleep in the yellow corn, then cross the trees and the holler to get to the bloody butcher field to eat–and they ate it and ate it.” Joyce recalls. “And opening day of deer season there were almost literal fights in my household over who got to hunt the bloody butcher field.” she reveals. “It was my field.” Autumn states firmly. So, does this mean the deer prefer the bloody butcher corn? “I don't know that we can tell that,” Joyce answers, “But the deer had a choice. And the deer chose to eat the bloody butcher.”
The deer had voted, but Joyce needed to be sure. “I still had to know it was going to make an excellent bourbon because I wasn't going to invest literally millions of dollars into a venture and make crappy bourbon, especially in the middle of bourbon country.” she says. So the Netherys set out to find a distillery that would take a small, one-off contract of experimental batches of whiskey. They ended up having to fling their net as far as Wisconsin, ending up working with Death’s Door Spirits (Death’s Door declared bankruptcy in 2018 and is now owned by Dancing Goat Distillery). “So we gathered up what the deer left us that year, and we took it to Wisconsin.” she recalls. Their thought was that Jeptha Creed would have one bourbon in its stable, and it would be a multigrain bourbon. They ordered the other three grains, asking for raw wheat, raw rye and malted barley. Here, fate stepped in once again; somewhere along the line the order was mixed up, and the Netherys arrived to find malted wheat, malted barley, and malted rye awaiting them.
“We got up there and found this out. It was like well, ‘good grief! This isn't what we ordered.’ But we started to do the experiment anyway.” Joyce tells us. They tried out multiple pairings of bloody butcher, commercial corn, and the three other malted grains. The first batch that came off the still was a combination of bloody butcher and malted wheat. “And I loved it,” Joyce recalls happily. “It was so good. It's so smooth…just full of flavor and it was just beautiful. And I thought, oh my gosh, we're so lucky this is beautiful. We've got our mash bill.” The next day, the batch that combined bloody butcher with malted rye came off the still, and Bruce immediately fell in love with that batch. The contest between husband and wife became malted wheat versus malted rye–and that is why Jeptha Creed now has three bourbons in its stable. One with bloody butcher corn and malted wheat, one with bloody butcher corn and malted rye, and one four-grain with bloody butcher corn and malted rye, wheat, and barley. “So that's how we got to our mash bills, and we just loved what we did there. We were just like, ‘Oh, why screw with a good thing?” Joyce finishes happily.
“When I taste our bourbon, a lot of times my mind goes to a beautiful, sunshiny day out in the fields of bluegrass. And it's just you know, that whole warm environment of being in Kentucky. That's what our bourbon makes me think of.” -Joyce Nethery
Jeptha Creed’s mash bills for their bourbons might have been a happy accident, but their distilling set-up was chosen with precision and intention. All three of their stills are from Vendome Copper & Brass Works, out of nearby Louisville. Their bourbon is made on a twelve inch diameter continuous column still with a thumper. “The thumper is the piece that gets that ethyl carbonate out,” Joyce comments. “So it really gives us a beautiful finishing cleanup stage.” she points out. Their moonshine is made on a 500-gallon hybrid pot still with bubble cap trays. Their vodka runs through both of those stills before finishing on another twelve-inch diameter column.
Where Jeptha Creed went specific with their corn and stills, they stuck to a very standard sort of yeast. “It's pretty common, you know, and very similar to Redstar.” Joyce comments. They hydrate that yeast before they put it into their fermenters, of which they now have eight (four 1000-gallon and four 2000-gallon). They get their barrels from Kelvin Cooperage, close by in Louisville. Joyce likes a #3 char, toasted white oak barrel in the full 53-gallon size. Right now, they’re building a 15,000 barrel palletized rick house to accommodate their growing spirits inventory. They don’t use temperature control in their barrel storage; “No, Mother Nature, just Mother Nature.” Joyce answers.
Being a ground-to-glass operation, Jeptha Creed owes much to Mother Nature—and they must work with her natural rhythms in a way non-farm-distilleries don’t have to. “It's really, really difficult. I don't know how else to convey to people that being a farm distillery is difficult. Except in that, for us to make a four-year bourbon, it actually takes us five years.” Autumn explains. “And in all honesty, it actually takes almost six years of planning.” She admits. Jeptha Creed doesn’t buy their corn, so what they put into the ground during growing season is what they’ll have to work with later in the year. “But it's also just really cool to have control over the entire process, and be able to do these fun, unique things that other people just don't get to do.” Autumn points out. “I have this philosophy that was built after, you know, doing this for almost seven-ish years at this point. Different rows of corn give you different flavors of bourbon the same way different varietals of grapes give you different flavors of wine. Corn does the same thing in bourbon.” She says. This is where Bruce, the progenitor of the distillery idea, comes back into the picture. “He is still our agricultural expert,” Joyce explains. “So he decides which [corn is planted] because we—actually, he--grows lots of other corns now besides just the bloody butcher, and he's actually developed a blue one that I call Bruce's blue.” She tells us. “He's doing a lot of stuff on the agricultural side, and providing us really beautiful, unique grades to distill and make our bourbon out of.” She finishes.
“We think it's important for people to understand that, even though we're new, we're up and coming. We were born and raised in this industry.” -Autumn Nethery
It took the Netherys a long time to choose the name of their distillery; “And when we did settle on the name [Jeptha Creed], we realized that we really, truly were tying our past in with our future.” Autumn tells us. This realization informed everything about their new brand’s bottle and label design. Shortly after the name was settled, Bruce designed an oval-shaped bottle with the Tree of Life stamped on it. Autumn, the marketing expert in the family, didn’t want to move forward with the oval design. “On the back bar, your bottle ends up getting turned sideways, so you'd have to end up having, like, a nice side label. And I would have spent all this time and energy on a pretty label on the front. I want the pretty label on the front to show!” she explains. So instead of stamping a Tree of Life on the bottle, they turned the bottle itself into one.
The roots shaped in the glass on their round bottle represent the past, reaching up to trunk of the label, representing the present, and finally the branches stretching over the shoulder of the bottle and up the neck represent the future. “I spent a year and a half on the design for this bottle,” Autumn tells us. The labels remain simple but elegant; matte black with just a bit of embossing and a pop of gold foil. A Celtic knot is imprinted into the glass on the center of the bottle, just below the label. “It represents the past, present, and future, or, you know, God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Explains Joyce. “It represents both, so it was just kind of welcoming to a lot of people and representative to us of…old-fashioned values with a Celtic knot being put on a new bottle and a new brand.” She tells us.
One of the ways they welcome consumers to the brand came about by complete accident. “We opened up on November 11th of 2016, which is Veterans Day. And to be honest, when we opened, we did not realize that we were always going to share our anniversary with Veterans Day.” Autumn explains. That first year, they wanted to do something special to honor American veterans and celebrate their first anniversary; enter the red, white, and blue corn mash bill. “Every year since then, on July 4th and Veterans Day, we will distill a red, white and blue mash bill using those corns.” Autumn tells us. Starting in 2022, once per year on their anniversary shared with Veterans Day, they will release the resulting bourbon. “A portion of the proceeds for the Veterans Day barrel, or bottle, will go to Veterans organizations. With each batch, it will change.” Batch one’s donation went to the Veterans Club of Kentucky; batch two’s donation will go to USA Cares, and so on each year. On the side of every one of these special barrels is a QR code. “As people come in and do tastings and tours here at the facility, we’ll keep a barrel of that red, white and blue mash bill out so that if you're active duty military, or a veteran, you can sign the barrel.” Autumn explains. “And we encourage people to take pictures of the barrel that they signed, so they can keep up with the number and everything.” She tells us. When the QR code is scanned, the signers can track what batch their barrel ended up in.
“So our legacy really is built upon our family, I mean, we've got a little bit of distillation with my mom. And then we've got this legacy of agricultural background there, my dad. And those two together have created Jeptha Creed. And we intend for this to be a family company that continues to grow as we grow.” -Autumn Nethery
Though Autumn and Joyce make up the mother-daughter duo that heads up Jeptha Creed, Bruce and Hunter continue to support the business with Bruce’s agricultural skills and honey from Hunter’s bees, which has made its way into Jeptha Creed’s honey vodka. The combined skills and experiences of the Netherys, spanning everything from industrial distillation to entrepreneurship to video editing and beyond, is what is driving this truly regional Kentucky bourbon brand higher. Though the Nethery ancestor might have been disappointed in his political dreams, it is highly likely he’d be right at home in the Jeptha Creed tasting room, watching his descendants pour from a bottle stamped with a symbol he’d recognize. Joyce and Autumn hope you’ll be right at home, too; whether you have served in the United States’ military or are a young woman interested in breaking into the male-dominated industry of craft spirits, they want you to come through the door and check out what they’re up to.
Tasting Notes
Straight 4-Grain Bourbon (49% ABV)
Nose: Lemon, Peach, Floral, Vanilla Cake, Brown Sugar, Toasted Coconut
Palate: The mouthfeel is light and thin with light oak flavors up front. Some subtle spice and vanilla emerges from the oak before settling into a long and sweet finish with notes of vanilla, caramel, toasted coconut and chocolate.
This bourbon is like eating the great Girl Scout classic, Samoas cookie, especially with the toasted coconut notes. It is deceptively easy on the palate considering it’s almost 100 proof, leading to an all around enjoyable experience that will make you want to get another box … we mean bottle!
Bottled in Bond Rye Heavy Bourbon (50% ABV)
Nose: Herbal, Corn Bread, Brown Sugar, Cinnamon, Leather
Palate: The mouthfeel is oily with a bit of heat. Sweet vanilla notes and orange citrus up front are quickly met with allspice, nutmeg and anise. The spices give way to a medium finish with notes of cranberries and cherries.
This is a really delicious whiskey. Very dynamic from start to finish. It’s like eating all of your favorite pies at once.
Red, White and Blue Kentucky Straight Bourbon, Batch 1 (50% ABV)
Nose: Creme Brûlée, Banana Bread, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Orange, Pecans
Palate: The mouthfeel is viscous with subtle vanilla and citrus notes up front. Black pepper and cinnamon take charge in the mid-palate leading to a medium/long finish with hints of baked pears, pepper and a touch of oak and flowers.
This is a good bourbon, though admittedly the least exciting of the three. It’s a great story with the three different varietals of heirloom corn and we love that a portion of the proceeds go to organizations supporting our nations veterans. Unfortunately the nose is a bit more appealing than the palate. It might be interesting to be able to taste bourbons made from the three corn varietals individually so we can see how each is represented in this mash bill.