The Foundation
coming soon
Depth & Balance
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Limited
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JIM RUTLEDGE
MASTER DISTILLER
Jim Rutledge has been making Kentucky bourbon since 1966. He started in Seagram’s Louisville research labs, spent seventeen years running industrial engineering out of the company’s New York headquarters, and came home to Kentucky in 1992 because the whiskey was where his heart was. He took over as Master Distiller at Four Roses in the mid-1990s and held the job for more than two decades — long enough to drag the brand back onto American shelves after forty years of being sold everywhere but here.
The industry noticed. Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame, inaugural class, 2001. Malt Advocate’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. Whisky Magazine named him American Whiskey Ambassador of the Year in 2008 and put him in the Icons of Whisky Hall of Fame in 2012.
He retired from Four Roses in 2015 and never actually stopped. At Jacob Spears he is doing what he has always done: setting the mashbill, watching the fermenters, and refusing to let anything leave the still that he would not pour for himself.
ASHLEY BARNES
MASTER BLENDER
Ashley Barnes came to whiskey from a pharmaceutical lab, and she has never really left the lab behind. Trained in molecular biochemistry and hardened by years in pharmaceutical quality control, she was recruited into the Kentucky bourbon industry and came up through the sensory and quality programs at Four Roses and Buffalo Trace before going out on her own in 2018.
What she brought with her is rare: a genuinely exceptional nose paired with the discipline to distrust it. She works through countless samples a day, and she builds blends the way a scientist builds a proof — every barrel measured, every decision defensible, nothing left to the story you tell about it afterward. For Jacob Spears, she is doing the hardest thing in this business: making the whiskey taste exactly right, and then making it taste exactly that way again.
The craft, people, and places behind Jacob Spears Bourbon.
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