Today we took ourselves on an educational field trip to the Jack Daniel’s Distillery in nearby Lynchburg. I have been indirectly funding the pension plan at this venerable company for some 40 years and we figured we might as well see where all the money went. After a drive on roads that follow the terrain and point in all directions except the direction we intended to go, we arrived at the distillery and headed into the visitor center and museum where we purchased tickets to go on one of their three categories of tour. We bought the pricey one ($25 a head) which included the tour and some tastings of a variety of products.
The walking part of the tour takes interested visitors past an EPA-approved rick burner with a smoke stack scrubber. They make their charcoal here from almost incinerated white oak. The guide told us that the essential criteria for Tennessee sipping whiskey is a corn mash, malted barley and rye grain mixture and the passage of every drop of alcohol through not less than a 10′ column of charcoal. The tour then heads over to a big grotto in the adjacent cliff side where there is a spring that produces abundant clear and tasteless water without any iron or other nasty things in the liquid. Visitors can try the water at a number of on-site drinking fountains.
Then we headed into the grain mill and the fermenting buildings that are adjacent to two large and two small distillation towers that collectively produce 100 gallons of 140-proof alcohol per minute. A bit of this product is used to ignite the ricks of white cedar for even incineration but the rest of it is sent on into the plant where it re-mixed with water to get the alcohol content down to where folks like it. We wandered through the fermentation section where strong odors and high temperatures were encountered. The fermentation puts off so much heat that they are required to refrigerate the fermentation tanks to keep the mash from turning into crummy-tasting corn meal.
We popped into the bottling line for Gentleman Jack (twice through the charcoal) but, since it was Sunday, they were not operating this little moneymaker. After distillation, the management diverts a little of the product to make small runs of specialty whiskey with honey or molasses or cinnamon for those requiring weird whiskey.
The tour was great fun, the tasting was okay but amounts provided were slim but, on the whole, we had a good time despite the very warm weather which had me sweating like a whore in church.
We left the distillery and headed into the town of Lynchburg which is actually a few 19th and early 20th century buildings built around the city hall located at the middle of the square. Peggy made a foray into the general store to buy Jack Daniel’s stuff and emerged soon after not too much poorer. On the way out of town we could see one of the distillery’s barrel houses where their products are aged. They have 89 seven story barrel houses on the property which hold a million gallons each. That’s 89 million gallons in storage. Nice long-term asset.
We got some photos. Check them out by clicking here