Next Wave Awards Master Distiller of the Year: Marianne Eaves
This feature is part of our 2024 Next Wave Awards.
In an industry ruled by old men who often work for a single legacy distillery their entire lives, Marianne Eaves has seemingly packed several full biographies into her 37 years — often as the only woman in the room. Her latest brand, Forbidden Bourbon, stems from the culmination of knowledge and skills gained from over a decade of toil for other people and companies.
With a chemical engineering major from the University of Louisville, and an MBA from Indiana University Bloomington, Eaves once had ambitions of working in biodiesel or renewable energy. She initially knew very little about spirits but, starting in 2009 at Brown-Forman as an intern, she showed an incredible knack for understanding flavor and quickly rose in the ranks.
Credit: Grant Moxley
Within just a couple of years she was the company’s master taster, working with master distiller Chris Morris to ensure the quality of product as well as help conduct Old Forester single barrel picks. The multi-billion-dollar monolith also started positioning her as a sort of face of the brand, even hiring her a speech coach and putting her through PR training.
“It did happen very quickly,” she recalls. “Still, it didn’t come super naturally to me. I’m an introvert.”
Eaves was just 28 when upstart Castle & Key offered her the opportunity to be its first master distiller. Not only would she get to create her own vodkas, gins, and whiskeys at the famed Old Taylor Distillery in Frankfort, which had been defunct since 1972, she would also become Kentucky’s first female master distiller since Prohibition.
The press ate it up, with countless articles and accolades given to her. Castle & Key didn’t even have a whiskey on the market yet, but Eaves was suddenly one of the most recognizable faces and most interviewed personages in the entire bourbon industry.
Credit: Grant Moxley
“I’d had all these ideas of things that I wanted to try while I was with Brown-Forman. But in a big corporate environment, it takes so long to get different experiments approved,” Eaves says. “So it was super exciting to me to have the chance to build it my way.”
By 2019, Eaves was ready to make the jump and strike out on her own, even while pregnant with her first child. She began consulting for other brands and started Eaves Blind, a bourbon tasting subscription experience designed to help consumers develop their palates. She was also tapped to help create Sweetens Cove, a whiskey brand owned by sports stars Peyton Manning and Andy Roddick.
“My own thoughts on how I can impact the product in the bottle have changed as I’ve evolved,” Eaves says. “My impact doesn’t have to be diminished if I’m not the one that distilled the product or wasn’t the one that blended the product. There are so many different ways to be a part of what eventually goes into the bottle.”
By last year, she was ready to be the full and total auteur behind a brand. “I decided I didn’t want to put anything in a bottle that I did not make by hand myself,” she says. “And that’s where Forbidden was born.”
Credit: Grant Moxley
Forbidden starts with a white corn and winter wheat bourbon recipe Eaves had initially distilled at Castle & Key using her preferred yeast and low-temperature fermentation methods, along with a similar bourbon she has since begun to distill at Bardstown Bourbon Company. After aging, she hand-blends less than 50 barrels together using an intricate method she likewise created herself. So far there have been three separate batches released and each has been well reviewed and sold out quickly online.
While she continues to receive a lot of press coverage, these days it’s about what’s in the bottle and why it’s so great.
“I’m really proud of being able to rewrite the narrative of what’s expected, what a master distiller does, and what a master distiller looks like,” Eaves says.
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