Jessi Baker grew up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a small mountain community that serves as the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and where her grandparents started Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen in 1950. Baker recalls that during her elementary school days, she would walk to the Candy Kitchen to work for her grandmother—packing taffy and dream of running her own business one day.

After graduating from Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Baker returned home to Tennessee for law school and married her high school sweetheart, Joe Baker.  She graduated from the University of Tennessee College of Law and worked as assistant district attorney in Sevierville, Tennessee.  

In 2009, when the Tennessee legislature passed a bill that legalized distilling spirits, the Bakers decided to follow his family’s 230-year history of East Tennesseans and make moonshine. They launched Ole Smoky Distillery in 2010, and Bakerthen stepped further into the distilling industry with the founding of the Gatlinburg Barrelhouse and its signature line of Davy Crockett’s Tennessee Whiskey. Ole Smoky acquired it as a logical step to broaden the brand to include an aged and flavored whiskey component. Their line of moonshine and whiskeys are now sold in all 50 states and 53 countries around the world.

Baker embraced the many ways moonshine could spice up everything from canning pickles and okra to making cupcakes and cobblers. She authored Shining, the Ole Smoky Moonshine Family Cookbook, a book that blends craft moonshine and Appalachia history with 65 family recipes (not all of them boozy) that have fed her family for generations.

Baker lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Joe, and their three children.