Zac Triemert
“Fermenting Memories Through Malt”
Jerome Zachary Triemert was born on August 13, 1974, and raised in Minnesota. When his beloved father died young, amateur brewer Zac turned his grief into purpose by fermenting a pale ale in his dad’s honor. Triemert realized that creating a crafted drink could serve as a way of dealing with loss. From that private act, he leapt toward a career spent turning grain, water, and time into liquid meant to be shared and enjoyed.
After attaining a BS in microbiology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Zac decided to cross the Atlantic to further study distilling at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh, Scotland. There, the language of Scotch whisky and the discipline of malted barley sharpened his instincts. That experience, he later said, taught him to respect single-malt tradition while permitting him to ponder new questions: how to honor the grain, how to coax nuance from a spirit without smothering it with gimmickry. Those thoughts returned with him to America in 2006, when he settled in Omaha, Nebraska. It was there that he first worked with a local State Senator to write and pass Nebraska’s Craft Distilling Bill into law. His success in that endeavor resulted in the founding of Brickway Distillery in 2013. Since that time, Brickway, located in Omaha’s historic Old Market District, has become the largest distillery in Nebraska.
From the start, Brickway’s whiskey program was a deliberate hybrid. That is, an American single-malt conceived with a brewer’s sensibility and aged with a cooper’s attention. Zac favored a double-pot still and maturing his whisky in ways that pulled from bourbon’s heat-driven transformations, while retaining a single-malt’s grain focus. He described the approach as “maturing it like a bourbon,” and yet the distillate arrived with a distiller’s insistence on barley-born character rather than on corn sweetness. The result was a spirit that stood between traditions: Scotch’s earthy, malted purity and bourbon’s caramel-oak signature.
One can trace the evolution of a Brickway bottle in the quiet cataloging Zac keeps: batch numbers written in a practiced hand, a record of distillation cuts, and the patient ledger of temperatures and proofs. The alchemy of whiskey, for Triemert, is much more a series of controlled variables and less a matter left to blind luck. That laboratory discipline, paired with ambitions learned during stints running early breweries and distilleries, created a whiskey program that continues to aim, not for flash, but for repeatable excellence.
The awards that have followed that kind of quality have served as a sort of external audit. Brickway’s single-malt whiskies have taken home multiple international golds and other medals, confirming that Zac’s insistence on technique has paid off in glass. But the trophies never became the story’s center. For Zac, the more meaningful measure was the tasting room conversation when a patron unlocks a whiskey through his nose and palate. Zac believes that it means something when a customer can taste wheat and warmth, or a nuance they might have missed otherwise.
On the personal side, Zac’s life folded into his work in obvious ways. He married Jenny Jessen in 2023 in a springtime ceremony held at a local Omaha venue, where the couple intentionally blended families; Jenny’s son walked her down the aisle, and the reception took place at Brickway itself, where the business and family narrative interlaced. After a honeymoon in Italy, Brickway’s multiple social channels celebrated the couple as they started a new chapter together, reminding bourbonophiles that for a busy owner/distiller, the personal and the professional rarely live in separate rooms.
Back in Omaha, Triemert pays attention to the yeasty odors of a dusty stillhouse the way master mechanics learn to listen to engines: critically, precisely, and with a perfectionist’s sense for what each internal secret reveals. But in the end, Brickway’s whiskey story is less about one towering founder than about a practiced hands-on approach: a scientist’s precision applied to an artisan’s patience. The program Zac Triemert built in Omaha’s brick-paved market stands today as proof that midwestern distilling can be both clever and honest. When he walks the warehouse and lifts a sample to his nose, he’s working at the intersection of craft and memory in the same place where, years before, a pale ale had become an elegy to his beloved dad and a promise to himself in a private offering that continues to ripple outward.
Sources:
Brickway Brewery & Distillery/Our Team, www.drinkbrickway.com
Edge Magazine, “Shared Experiences,” Kathy Rygg, August 2020
Omaha Daily Record (Omaha, Nebraska), “Brickway Distillery…”, Nikki Palmer, November 6, 2020
Nebraska Wedding Day, “Profile of Triemert/Jessen wedding”, Sydney Stevens, Summer 2023
YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=cEZixzsZ_5M
Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee
