Jack Daniels

Distillery Tours Blog
We had a wonderful time this last August touring some distilleries in Tennessee and Kentucky. The following seven blogs have pictures and a little bit of information about what we saw. The information is mostly gathered from our memory of the tours - which isn't perfect. The take home message is that we had a great time and wanted to create this blog for future reference.
Hope you enjoy!

Our first stop in our distillery tour - this was the only one outside of Kentucky and also the first one. We had a great time on the tours - there is so much American history in this industry it's fascinating.

The name of this statue?
"Jack on the Rocks" of course...

The original spring used - and still used...
"it all starts with the water"

Jack Daniels whiskey goes through a filtration process - it involved sugar maple trees burned down to charcoal and then used as a filter for the sour mash - to turn it into whiskey.

Where the charcoal is made - in the foreground you can see the sugar maple cut into 2x2's and stacked, ready to burn.

These stacks of cut sugar maple are left out in the
weather to age them properly.

The sugar maple charcoal is put into vats - the sour mash is dripped into this 10 foot thick filter and takes about six days to come out of the other side.

The charcoal is a bit bigger than I thought it would be.

 

One of the trees in the area - the thick black bark is caused by a whiskey fungus (aka Baudoinia compniacensis). There is a bit of a controversy surrounding this fungus as scientists don't know that much about it. They do know that it feeds off the whiskey vapor that occurs as the liquor ages in the barrels.

One of the ways you can buy a used whiskey barrel
in Lynchburg, TN. If you want it whole and
full of aged whiskey it'll cost you $8,000.

Lynchberg, TN - it's a company town. In fact the Jack Daniels family were able to survive prohibition because they (actually a nephew in particular) opened a drugstore when the distillery was shut down. Every payday each employee gets a bottle of whiskey. Ironically it's a dry county - you can't buy any liquor there.

This ended up being one of our favorite tours - if you go to Nashville take the time to drive down to Lynchberg and
check it out.