Jeptha Creed Distillery started as a dream: Bruce and Joyce Nethery dreamed of starting a business that they could hand down to their children Autumn and Hunter. Bruce was a farmer, Joyce was a chemical engineer, and the family farm sits right in the middle of bourbon country. A distillery seemed meant to be.
We started working toward making that dream a reality back in 2013. We grew and tested different varietals of corn. We tested recipes. We zoned and constructed buildings, roads, parking lots—even a bridge. We filled our building with huge stills, a gift shop, and a bar and café. We built our brand from the ground up. It took an immense amount of passion and hard work to get Jeptha Creed ready for visitors by Veterans Day four years ago.
When we proudly opened our doors in 2016, we offered our original and honey vodka as well as our original and lemonade moonshine. Since then, we’ve grown by leaps and bounds, distilling more product than we ever anticipated: our goal was to build one barrel barn per year, but five are already full of product, with more to be built soon.
Since our opening, we’ve expanded our award-winning vodka line to six flavors: Original, Honey, Apple, Blueberry, Coffee, and Hot Pepper. We also expanded our line of moonshines to five flavors: Original, Louisville Lemonade, Cinnamon, Blackberry, and Apple Pie. We released three experimental limited-edition whiskeys before releasing our first Straight Four-Grain Bourbon in the spring of 2019. We also took to the underbrush in order to distill a unique PawPaw Brandy that has gotten national attention. We’ve even ventured into the world of hand sanitizer (we didn’t see that one coming).
We can’t help but be proud of how far we’ve come since our opening in 2016. In addition to our catalog of spirits, our distillery has become a tourist destination as a stop on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail Craft Tour. Our tour and tasting program was a labor of love, which is why it was nationally recognized by the American Distilling Institute. If you haven’t visited recently, our unique (and formerly exclusive) barrel tasting experience is the perfect way to experience Jeptha Creed while safely social distancing.
Jeptha Creed spirits have expanded into three states (Indiana, Tennessee, and Missouri), with two more on the horizon for 2021. We love seeing our label on shelves far from the family farm where we got our start! If you can’t make it to the Midwest, we’ll also soon be shipping to select states.
Even though we’ve grown faster than we expected, we’ve always stayed true to ourselves and our roots. Despite increased production, we maintain our founding principles of Ground to Glass. That means that we grow or locally source the ingredients used in our spirits. That’s why if you visit us for a barrel tasting, you’ll see cornfields of Bloody Butcher corn right past the barrel barn door. If you stop by the bar for a cocktail, we’ll garnish it with herbs we picked that day. If you buy a bottle of our spirits, you’ll taste the freshness of ingredients that are never artificial.
In the past four years, we’ve grown more than we ever thought possible. We are so grateful to our employees, customers, and you, for being a part of the Jeptha Creed family. We can’t wait to see what the next four years bring!