The Jack Daniel's Thread

Now here's my kind of thread!
I always have a few bottles of Single Barrel in my cabinet. If you ever have the opportunity, visit Lynchburg. I've been twice and taken the distillery tour. Amazing! Still have the special bottles I bought from there. Those stay unopened to age a little more.

Dave

<edit> found a pic of the safe and some Single Barrel from the tour.
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I was just there at JD back in April. It's amazing that they produce every drop in rural TN. Beautiful area just doesn't seem like the location where something so great comes from. But then again something that good couldn't come from the BIG CITY

 

Yeah, it's kinda blows your mind to think EVERY drop of Jack Daniel's made comes from that cold water spring! Did you eat at the red caboose BBQ joint in "Downtown" Lynchburg? Best BBQ I've had in years!!

Dave

 

We actually ate at the Quiznos in the town before Lynchburg. The lady that gave us the tour didn't say anything about eating at the restaurant in "downtown" lynchburg. I was tempted to buy a bottle, but several times in the past while flying bottles or souvenier snow globes for my neice were broken by the luggage handlers. Did your tour guide point out the board that shows who bought whole barrels? Our tour guide pointed to George Strait tag shows that he bought a couple of barrels worth.

 

Any idea how much a barrel runs, price wise?

 

Yep the safe is what done ole Jack Daniel in. I used to store the empty bottles for Jack Danels in my warehouse in Fayetteville, TN about 15 miles away. I still have a few bottles that they gave me over the years.

I hate to give you some bad news. Whiskey only ages while it is in the barrel. Once it is bottled the ageing stops.

Another fact the county that Lynchburg is located Moore County is a dry county. They can only sell commerative bottles of Jack there and I believe only at the welcome center on the square.

 

between $8600-9600

 

Around $9000 to $10,000 is what I was told by a friend that works there. Doing the math from the picture I say that is correct. 40 cases 6 bottles to the case around $40 a bottle is $9600.00

 

Yeah, I know about the aging, That's just the excuse I use when people ask why I have 12-13 unopened bottles of Jack in my cabinet. I do have a few special commerative bottles that I just didn't feel a need to open, also. I remember the guide saying that changes in Tenn law make it impossible to repeal the dry law even if they wanted to. Something about not enough reg voters in the county, IIRC.

Funny thing I noticed on the Single Barrel wall was right near George Strait was a Rite Aid from some Smalltown, USA.

It's a great tour! I highly recommend the detour if you're ever driving through Nashville.

Dave

 

I thought I had more pics, just can't find them. Here's a few more:
1.JD firetruck
2.what you get when you buy the barrel
3.we met Jimmy Bedford in the store
4.Jack Daniel's actual gravesite!
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Yes Moore County is the Smallest county in Tennessee by land mass and population. If every Registered voter in Moore county voted to repeal the dry law they would still be short.

It is an interesting tour. I had been working with Jack Daniel's and Brown-Forman who owns JD for several years when I finally decided to go on the tour one weekend. The guide didn't like me much. We were at the barrel house and he started telling everybody exactly how much taxes JD paid on each barrel in there. I then pointed out that most barrels JD is not taxed on as they are exported. He gave me an evil glare and said yeah I was right they are not taxed on those. After that I shut up.

I still have several friends in the receiving and bottling area I stop in and see them every couple months when I am down there checking on the warehouse.

 

This is an interesting thread.....

His real name was Jasper Newton Daniel. Orphaned at an early age, he lived several places before being taken in by Lutheran minister Dan Call, who had a mid-size farm in Lynchburg. He learned how to make whiskey when he was 16 or so, from a slave named "Uncle Nearis," who lived and worked on the Call farm. Every farm of even a marginal size had a still on it. My family seat is in nearby Winchester TN orignally coming to that area in 1682 for the natural springs, called "Estill Springs." They owned large tracts of land and many stills, that's not how they made their living though.

The distinctive 'sweetness' that you get from Jack Daniel's whiskey goes back to Uncle Nearis's preparation of the whiskey. He used what later came to be called the "Lincoln County Process" and was probably first used by slaves many years prior. They simply ran the clear distillate over sugar maple charcoal and it was known to add a little sweetness and take away the "hog tracks" (hangover). It was usually then put in charred oak barrels for aging, but often consumed as clear whiskey. Tennessee Sipping Whiskey is aged a minimum of two years in charred American oak barrels, just like Kentucky Straight Bourbon. It is the charcoal filtering that distinguishes it from Kentuckt Bourbon, and it is not classified as Bourbon, though some people don't know the difference. The sugar maple charcoal imparts a sweet taste to the distillate. If you ever mix Jack and coke, this sweet taste becomes prevalent, it's not because of the sugar in the coke.

Back to the story, Jack and Uncle Nearis made whiskey for sale on the Call place, Call sold it at his dry-goods store. as most every store sold whiskey. But young Jack was much more ambitious. He began to make wagon trips to further away markets to sell the whiskey. When he was in his early 20's he received his family inheritance from his father's estate after much wrangling among his siblings. He received a little over 1,000 and bought a 140 acre farm in Lynchburg and went in as partners with Dan Call to start a commercial distillery, called simply "Daniel and Call Distillery." They did very well despite the Civil War and the upswing of Federal Taxes and the growing tide of prohibition. That growing resistance to drink would eventually force minister Call to withdraw from the business, selling out to Jack, and then Jack using his spark of marketing genius to craft an image that is still going strong today. What were his innovations? One, he created an air of tradition with the "Old No. 7" and he also had the stroke of genius to market his product in square bottles so it wouldn't roll around on the floor of the wagon. And it would be the case today that square JD bottles don't roll around on the floor of the truck either....HA!

The interesting thing here is that Daniel and Call were actually small potatoes compared to even distillers in the same county, Moore County, TN. The distillers in Nashville were over ten times larger than even the larger Moore County distillers! The largest distillers were producing 300-400 thousand gallons per year whereas the largest Moore county distilleries, larger than Jack's operation, were making around 30,000 gallons per year. There were distillers on every corner, more common than churches, in stark contrast to today, where only Jack Daniels and George Dickels are the only major distilleries in the entire state and only one other to speak of, the Prichard's Distillery in Kelso, which makes fine Rum, and is a functional distillery.

The legendary "Cave Springs Hollow" didn't enter the picture until 1884, Jack was already a wealthy man by this time. It actually was a distillery that had sat dorman for many years, known as "Hiles and Berry." He bought the property, totally 142 acres, at auction for $2,160!! Jack immediately set up a higher capacity still in the brick still house and the one room office building and started distilling using the 56 degree, iron free, spring water. The rest....as they say, is history.

 

The above information is definitely NOT part of the distillery tour........nor is it copied and pasted from the internet. Pieces of it are from Jack Daniel's biography "Blood & Whiskey"....other parts are just "received" history from Middle Tennesee.

 

That would've been a great treat....especially considering that Jack had a private collection of whiskies and brandies....thousands of bottles. They were mostly sold off by his nephew Lem Motlow, who took over the distillery a year or two before he died, but he probably kept the premium stuff. We're talking about longer aged whiskey that was 'barrel proof'....that is....not cut to 100 proof. Master distillers, even today, keep older bottles around for tasting reference.

Higher proof whiskey doesn't mean that it burns more, it's actually much smoother. "Booker's Bourbon" is one of the few products available in stores at barrel proof, it averages between 120-126 proof and is considered the ultimate connisseur Bourbon. You cut it at least 50% with water and the flavor profile is just incredible, smokey, sweet, caramel, and woody. Funny too though is that when cut it is strikingly similar to regular old Jim Beam, because that's basically what it is.

One huge difference between Jack Daniel and today's distilleries......Jack Daniel actually made whiskey. Hardly any of the names associated with whiskey, such as Bill Samuels (nice guy, and a major party animal) and Maker's Mark, are actually whiskey men, that is, men that make whiskey. They have it done for them by master distillers. Jack Daniel was a master distiller of the first order. Booker Noe, master distiller emeritus of Jim Beam, who was the grandson of Jim Beam, was a whiskey man, he made whiskey. Interestingly enough, there are Beam family members that are master distillers at most of the distilleries in Kentucky, like Heaven Hill and Buffalo Trace. These are the men that actually make the whiskey, taste it, set the mash bill, do the testing, etc. Even in Jack Daniel's day, the Beams were known as master distillers and it was said that what they didn't know about distilling..."Wasn't worth spit." They, like Jack Daniel's ancestors, were from Dutch and Irish stock, who brought knowledge of distilling with them when they came over. The fact that many of these families ended up in Tennessee and Kentucky and were distilling was absolutely intentional. Three things, the whiskey rebellion, Jefferson's "corn patent," and a desire to be able to make whiskey without constraint, caused many of these families to plod down to Tennesee and Kentucky, oh...and the iron free, high calcium, water was perfect, too.

 

Nice post...toasts all around!!