Surprisingly, it hasn't been all that long since we last posted some of the goings on around here! And we're back today with two posts about some of our recent adventures. About 3 weeks ago, Heather and I woke up on a Saturday morning and decided that we should get out of town for the day. Let's see, we've been to the west, we've been north, we've been to Atlanta... where else can we go? Why, to the great Jack Daniel's distillery of course! So after a quick breakfast at home, it was off to the tiny town of Lynchburg, TN to see how that famous sour mash Tennessee Whiskey is put together.
Lynchburg is just about a 90 minute drive Southeast from Nashville. We've seen a fair bit of Tennessee back country before, but this was another great opportunity to cruise the rolling hills of good ol' rocky top (Commence song now)! We got to town around 11:30 and thought we would get a bite to eat at a diner in town. Lynchburg has a very quaint little downtown that is just a little square, with the town city hall/jail in the middle of it. Interestingly, Lynchburg is a mega hub for Harley-Davidson enthusiasts. The motorcycle-to-car ratio in the town square was around 3:1. The square was mostly full of diners and nick-nack shops, and we found a fun little place to get some southern chow. After filling our bellies and having a look around the square, we drove down the road to the distillery.
Here is a picture of one of the main buildings you see from the parking lot. The distillery, as you can imagine, is absolutely huge but it is fairly spread out and well hidden among the dense woods and up a pretty big hill. There was a nice welcome center where you can sign up for tours and read a bit about the history of the place while you wait.
Here are a few of the more interesting things we saw!
Lynchburg is in Moore County, TN. Since prohibition, Moore County has been a dry county. Yeah, I know. try to put some logic into that hopper! Of course, Jack Daniel's stands to make a lot of money by selling commemorative bottles in their gift shop. So, they have arranged to be the only place in the county where people can purchase alcohol. It isn't served, just sold. On our tour, the guide noted that this statue of Jack Daniel on a rock is your "only chance to get a shot of Jack Daniel on the rocks".
Heather in front of an opening to a limestone cave! It's amazing to feel how cool the air is coming out of the cave (around 56 degrees) all year long!
Self explanatory...
I guess now is as good a time as any to give a "brief" description of how whiskey is made.
One of the most critical components of any good whiskey or bourbon is the water. The main reason all bourbon comes from Kentucky and Jack Daniel's comes from Tennessee is because of the abundance of limestone-filtered spring water. This is also the reason that so many distilleries are located in the middle of absolutely nowhere. They are all positioned right up against a series of caves or creeks that provide the very pure water. By the way, I found out that Jack Daniel's produces around 75,000 gallons of whiskey each and every day! They must have a serious water source somewhere! Anyways, a variety of grains (corn, barley, and rye) are ground up into a mash and boiled. This process releases the natural sugars from the grains. Yeast is added which converts the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This mixture is then filtered and distilled, which is the process of boiling the liquid and capturing the evaporate which is now a high-alcohol grain spirit. At this point, the liquid can become a variety of spirits...it's what happens next that determines what we'll call it.
If we were in Kentucky making bourbon about 100 years ago, we would put the distilled spirit in a mason jar and call it moonshine. The more modern and commercial approach is to dilute the spirit to lower the alcohol level from around 120 proof (60%) to between 80-90 proof (40-45%). Then, the liquid would be placed in virgin oak barrels and aged for a long, long time. The regular line of bourbons and whiskeys are typically aged for around 8-10 years. A higher shelf spirit may be aged for 10-15 years. A super premium spirit may be aged for 30+ years!!! The whiskey is stored in massive buildings (some are 7-8 stories tall) that hold tens of thousands of barrels each. The picture above gives you an idea of the effect of different locations in a building can have on the color imparted by the barrel on the whiskey. During the aging process, the whiskey works its way into and out of the oak barrel which gives the nice amber color and imparts a smoother, mellow, smokey sweetness that is much easier to drink than straight moonshine. Interestingly, if you put 53 gallons of distilled spirit into a barrel, you won't get 53 gallons out. Around 2% is lost to what distillers call the "angel's share". Now, they do things a bit differently in Tennessee than they do in Kentucky. Jack Daniel's filters all of their distilled spirits through 10 feet of charcoal before aging it in barrels. It takes nearly a week for the whiskey to make its way through the charcoal, but they say it is totally worth the wait.
I'd recommend clicking on this picture to see it a bit bigger. Here's a neat picture of an industrial-looking building in the foreground with a series of pipes bringing fresh water down from a storage tank at the top of the hill. The big white building on top of the hill is where they keep the barrels. There are probably about 50 of these buildings in the area. Yeah, we're talking about 28 million gallons per year folks!!
So that's the gestalt of our trip! A beautiful drive in the back country of Tennessee brought us to the most notable Tennessee whiskey distillery, and possibly the most notable American whiskey distillery. It was really fun to see the entire process and get another taste of another uniquely Tennessee experience.
Stay tuned for a post on our recent trip to Henry Horton State Park for some camping!
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