Jakie Zykan’s career arc has centered around one thing: her amazing palate.
Before she gained international fame in her role as Master Taster for Brown-Forman’s Old Forester brand, she was already a bit of a local celebrity in the Louisville bartending community for her palate. She’d successfully identified several vodkas in a blind tasting, making her the only person in that educational session at the local culinary school to do so.
“I wasn’t a vodka drinker and I wasn’t studying it at all,” Zykan recalls. “It was one of those instances where he went through and talked about every single one and gave the background of what the constituents were that went into making it. I smelled and tasted every single one. And then I don’t know why everything just kind of dovetailed in that moment, it clicked. And I was like, I think I know what all these are. He overheard it and was like, oh, anybody else want to play this game? And of course, everybody in the room is like, yeah, I want to try.
He made everybody stand up and go through them one by one. If you knew what it was, then you could stay standing, and if you didn’t, you had to sit down. I got every single one of them right and I was the last person standing.”
Vodka is defined by the United States government as “neutral spirit without distinctive character, aroma, taste or color,” making Zykan’s correct identification of multiple vodkas particularly impressive and setting her up for a career using her palate. She would go on to serve as Master Taster for the Old Forester brand for seven years before departing to pursue her own interests
Zykan grew up as a pretty adventurous eater. Later when she was bartending in St. Louis, she went through a stint where she wasn’t drinking and instead relied on her sense of smell to create cocktails.
“I’ve been like in my own little silo of trying to understand how I work and what brings me joy and what appeals to me and owning my choices,” Zykan says. “I’ve really come to terms with the fact that I am a highly sensitive person. And when I say that, I mean it in the true sense that it is now, as a collective, we define it as 20% of the population is just hypersensitive. That’s not just through smell or taste, it’s everything. So like I get overwhelmed by anything sensory, including noise, including lights, all of it. And that plays a lot into this ability to find more nuanced things.”
“I've really come to terms with the fact that I am a highly sensitive person. And when I say that, I mean it in the true sense that it is now, as a collective, we define it as 20% of the population is just hypersensitive.”
—Jackie Zykan
Since departing from Old Forester, Zykan has worked as Master Blender for the Hidden Barn brand and has worked as a freelance blender for several projects behind the scenes. In addition to all of this, she has started her own perfume line called ODUOAK.
“I started studying perfumery to get to know again some great old friends of chemical compounds and their names, as I am a person who was working in the Bourbon industry in a public facing setting with a lot of tastings,” Zykan recalls. “As I’m sure you’ve seen the evolution of those environments, what used to be 10 years ago of going, oh, wait, there’s other things than corn? There’s a difference between wheat and rye? Everyone was approaching tasting notes as if they were in layman’s terms. I think of it in terms of making every tasting note into Kleenex terms, in that it’s not a tissue, it’s Kleenex. This is vanilla. We all agree this is vanilla. No one’s saying vanillin, nobody’s saying diacetyl. No one’s using actual chemical words. They’re using fluffy descriptors that you would find on a candle package. Then you start leading tastings and people in the back of the room are asking you questions. When you are standing in front of a room of people who are interested enough in Bourbon to have paid for the ticket to be there and spent their time to be there, they want to hear what you have to say because they put you in a position from their perspective that you are somehow going to be able to offer more than what they’re currently sitting with from a knowledge standpoint.”
Zykan started to study perfumery to give herself a broader vocabulary and to expand her knowledge base.
“I learn every day constantly,” she says. “As a female in this position, it’s almost as if there is less room for error because they’re already expecting you to make a mistake. They’re already halfway to that understanding, so you cannot trip up on a word, you cannot mispronounce something, you cannot mix up a number, or in that instant, your entire credibility disappears. Whereas I don’t think other individuals that are of a gender that was more commonly associated with this category in those roles necessarily experience the same thing.”
At the same time, Zykan says she’s very comfortable saying “I don’t know” when someone asks her a question, which leaves her open to continuing to learn and grow.
Zykan’s educational background is in biology and chemistry — she has a bachelor’s degree in the former and a minor in the latter, but is one credit away from turning that minor into a bachelor’s degree. She has the educational chops to use the science terminology, in other words.
“When people start using chemical compounds in their tasting notes, I know what all these words mean,” she says. “How can I take this and apply it and go back to my roots from a chemical understanding and relate it to an every person understanding? Let’s get nerdy. As I started retraining myself to build a sensory bank based not off of “smell this vanilla candle,” but instead “smell this bicyclic lactone sample,” I was getting more into associating the chemical compounds to the smell as opposed to the lofty language. That’s how I came across all these different perfumery supply companies, and I was like, holy shit, all of these compounds are available out here, any aromatic compound you can imagine, you can buy it online. Anyone can. And then I was like, wait a minute, what’s the philosophy behind the construction of perfume? What is the template they’re following in order for it to be quote unquote done the right way?”
Zykan started to realize there were many crossovers between the philosophy of blending perfume and the philosophy of blending whiskey.
“There is some sort of theory behind how to blend and balance out perfume, and I was like, I have to know more about this,” Zykan recalls. “I wondered if there’s anything I could take from that and apply to constructing new flavor profiles with whiskey and understanding how these compounds work together and how the experience of them is received. Is there any connection here? Can I build a bridge? And so that’s what I started doing.”
At the same time, Zykan had noticed that people often would comment about wanting to bottle the scent of a whiskey warehouse but no one had been able to successfully do that yet. Bourbon scented candles, she noted, were kind of close to some of the layman’s terms that people would use like vanilla and caramel, but nothing was based off of the actual chemical compounds. She’d based her career so far on being able to deconstruct flavors into their chemical names, so she felt she had an advantage when it came to creating an actual whiskey scent, and that’s exactly what she did with ODUOAK.
“I started playing with these fragrances and I used Bourbon to contribute the smell of Bourbon to the fragrance because the fragrance itself tells the story of a moment in which I was drinking Bourbon and experienced some sort of expansion or life lesson,” she explains. “Every sensory memory from that moment is what goes into that bottle. So this perfume thing, I know it’s like, oh, Jackie’s doing perfume. Cool. No, Jackie’s transmuting heartbreak into a bottle of a scent.”
Once she left Old Forester she started working on Hidden Barn, but during that time she was doing numerous projects in the background as well.
“I had a two-year contract with Hidden Barn,” she says. “I was still doing blending as an independent consultant for a multitude of startup brands that were like, “Hey, we know what we want it to taste like, but we don’t know how to make it taste that way or where to get the stuff or who to talk to help.” And so I would go in and tinker. I always joke, there’s two different price points. There’s the price point of me just getting the job done, and then there’s the price point of me getting the job done and you being able to say that I did the job. There’s a lot of risk involved from my personal perspective. When you start tying your name into things, when it’s a flash in the pan, a quick project you’re just going in and being utilitarian. You get it done and you’re moving on. Like, these aren’t people I’ve known a long, long time. If they decide to do something questionable and my face is associated with it, I have to be very protective of that because that hinders my capacity for income further down the line.”
Zykan is still doing consulting on blending and cocktails and is continuing to work on her perfumery skills, applying life lessons to her chosen career path. She’s currently the cocktail columnist for Louisville’s Voice-Tribune, where she ties locally available ingredients like clover into cocktail recipes and talks about foraging and being in harmony with nature to an audience that might not otherwise consider such pursuits.
“I’m in this chapter of life where I trust that there’ll be opportunities and I’m just going to follow what feels right instead of what I think I should be doing,” Zykan says. “And if I’m wrong about it, cool, we’ll pivot, we’ll do something else. It’s just a very different place than this fear-based, like, don’t fuck up mentality.”
Maggie Kimberl is the Content Editor of American Whiskey Magazine and the Co-Chair of the World Whiskies Awards. She is a freelance spirits journalist focusing on whiskey culture in the United States, though she considers herself to be ‘geographically blessed’ to live in the epicenter of the bourbon world, Louisville, Kentucky. When she’s not covering the bourbon beat you can find her browsing through vintage vinyl with her kids or tending to her homegrown tomatoes. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and check out her blog.
