Tennessee | Jack Daniel's Distillery Tour

North is where we make all the whiskey, okay, and south is where they bottle most of it, the lion's share of it, and that's another one of our barrel houses. They're located on the ridges and the hills so they can breathe. All good whiskey needs to breathe, okay. Those windows are just mesh and covered with bars or bars covered with mesh basically. It's free-flowing. Now we're not burning today because why? It's a holiday. Darren and Tracy are the guys that do this. They're the only two guys in the world that do this, okay. They only work the first shift five days a week and they don't work weekends, okay, on holidays. So what do they do? That wood you see down there, that's hardwood sugar maple. It comes within an 80-mile radius of Jack Daniels. It's cut in four-foot length two-by-twos. They cut it at the sawmills that are about 80 miles in circumference from here and they bring them to us stacked like that. Now that's a rick of wood. A rick of wood is just a measurement of wood, okay. Two cords make a rick. If you buy firewood around here, you might buy the cord or buy the rick. That's what that is. So they take those four ricks there and put them up under the hood and then Darren and Tracy start to perform their magic. Well, first off, they got a helper named Stick. Darren, Tracy, and Stick. And Darren usually, or Stick usually gets here early in the morning and goes down there in the hall and pulls off the accelerant for the fire. What do y'all think that accelerant is? 140 proof. Corn, liquor, moonshine, basically. It's raw whiskey. They get it and they bring it down here and they spray it. Stick sprays it in the center, okay, and then they ignite it. Now Darren and Tracy got to know when in that burn process to take the hose you see down and spray on that fire. If they spray too much too soon, they get a bunch of sugar maple. It's unburnt sugar maple. They spray a little too late, they get a bunch of sugar maple ash. Neither is conducive to making our whiskey. But when Darren and Tracy are done, they got a great big old fat pile of charcoal right there in the center. Now Stick, he goes over and starts scooping it up and puts it in the bin. Now when it comes out, it's in irregularities. It's not the same size. We need it to be kind of uniform. So what we do is take it over here to the grindhouse and grind it down to the consistency that we need, okay. Y'all come on, I'll show you what that looks like. Be careful and watch your step coming down. Use a handrail if you need it. We got two of them, we use primarily this one over here. This got the loaded up, got the wood under. All right y'all, that's about the size it looks like when it comes out from under the hood. We can't use it this size right here. It's not uniform. If we start dripping our whiskey over the charcoal melon vats, it won't perform the function that we want it to. So we got to reduce it down to the size that will, okay. We usually bring it down about like this right here, pea size, somewhere in there, varying sizes. That way when we put it inside our charcoal melon vats, it'll perform the functions that we want it to. One of those functions is it melons our whiskey, okay. I'll tell you about the rest of those functions when we get up there what they do. But one of them is it melons the whiskey. Now this is a time-lapse video of the process, okay. Trust me, ain't nothing that works that hard that fast around here, okay. You'll see Darren and Tracy splitting through there in a minute. It don't work that hard, but because it's a hot job. Sometimes in the wintertime when I work, I can feel it up there on the hillside. Now we don't do that many burns a day. Sometimes we don't burn at all, depends on what the schedule is. So they do about 800 of bricks a year. Any questions? How old are Darren and Tracy? Those gentlemen right there on the wall. They wet it the whole part of the process. You don't get to see it. I mean it's pretty fast, but they wet it during the burn. You just got to know when in that burn to do it. You do it too fast, it puts it out. You do it too slow, and you get a bunch of ash. So they got it down. They've been doing it for a while. They're the only two guys that do it in the world. This big container right here, it's got number seven on it. That's where we keep the charcoal when we're not using it. We store it in there. All right, so I heard you say we're in the wettest, driest county in Tennessee. Well, we're probably the most flammable county for its size in Tennessee anyway, because we got a whole lot of whiskey here. We make a whole lot of whiskey, and whiskey burns. It's flammable, right? So we got a full-time fire brigade. It's made up of full-time employees that are professionally trained firefighters. They go to the Deason Fire Academy out here in Tennessee, and then they go to the Industrial Fire Academy out in A&M, Texas, and they're professionally trained. Now they have other jobs here. Some of them are still house workers. Some of them are guides. Some of them work in fermentation. Some of them work everywhere else around here. Whoever need them, they're on call to come on out. Now, we've not had a fire here since the 30s. We don't want one either. This is the 1919 La France. This is not what we use today, okay? We got modern apparatuses, but now we still use this one today. This is the 1924 REO Speedwagon, okay? Y'all ever heard of the band REO Speedwagon? Well, that's where they come from. That's where the name comes from. It stands for the Ransom Eli Olds. He was the maker of this apparatus, but he also made Oldsmobile cars, okay? Now, we're not saying they named that after our fire truck, but they named it after those fire trucks that he made. Any questions? Now, this one goes everywhere. It goes overseas. It's been to the Czech Republic. We use this in promotion of one of our whiskeys. It's actually a liqueur, Tennessee Fire. It's old number seven infused with cinnamon. It's really tasty, if you like cinnamon. Any questions? All right, y'all follow me, which is good. It goes good on ice cream and coffee. It's good water. That's the reason the Scots and the Irish locate their distilleries on rivers and streams. That's where their water sources are. This is our water source for Jack Daniels. This cave springs water. Jack started making whiskey here in 1866, okay? He was 16 years old. When he set up still here, he was looking for a cool, clear, iron-free source of water for his whiskey, and he found it right here. This water's 56 degrees year-round. It's crystal clear, as you can see, and it's iron-free. And why is it important for it to be iron-free? Because iron adulterates our whiskey. It's got a high iron content. That's why our barrels don't have any metals in them, okay? They're all wood, because over a four to seven-year period, if you've got alcohol at a high iron content interacting with the alcohol in the whiskey, it'll turn our whiskey black and adulterate the taste. Well, Jack knew that then, and we know it now, okay? He knew it was iron-free simply by taste. Anybody raised on a farm had a well. That well water was generally limestone water or sweet water. That's what this is here. This is a limestone cave. There's over 9,000 caves in Tennessee. We have more caves than any state in the union, and this one's limestone. That limestone removes the iron from the water. It also imparts calcium and magnesium in there that gives it a sweet taste, which is important in our whiskey, okay? So Jack started making this water, using this water here, and it's the same water we use. We use the same mash bill or grain bill, same fermentation process, same water, and same distillation process Jack used over 150 years ago. In fact, attention to detail and tradition has made us the number one selling whiskey in the world today. We sell more whiskey than anybody else. If you don't believe me, just Google it. Any questions? No, we don't know the source of the water. We have no idea where it comes from. We've been back in there about a mile and a half. After that, it goes subterranean. We get about two million gallons out, comes out of here a day. Now, we don't use that much of it a day. That's how much flows through, or too much of it. Jasper Newton is his given name. That's what his mom and daddy named him. Baby Jackie was his nickname because he was the 10th of 10 kids, but he shortened it to Jack. That's how we know him. That's how the world knows him. His real name is Jasper Newton Daniel. Now, this is not the original statue that stood here. The original statue that stood here stood here from 1941 to the year 2000. That's that Italian marble one y'all saw in the visitor center. He greeted you when you come through the door. This gentleman right here represents a young Jack. That's old Jack. Now, that's one representative of Jack's actual height, old Jack. Jack was only five foot two inches tall when he was alive, wore size four shoes. He's a little fella. This gentleman right here, he's five six. He weighs 600 pounds. He's done and bronzed by a local sculptor here in Tennessee. Jack didn't always dress like this. He didn't start dressing like this until after his 21st birthday. On his 21st birthday, he disappeared from the distillery for a while. Nobody knew at the time where he went. He's gone for about a week. Come back about a week later, he had a suit of clothes like this. Black frock coat, swallowtail, wool, white shirt, black bow tie, black vest, sometimes tawny colored, sometimes black. Black breeches, black boots, and a rolled flannel hat. That's how Jack dressed for the rest of his life from that day on. He even worked there. Now, he did his own work here too, but he helped out at the distillery as well even after. Now, he wanted to be seen as a gentleman distiller, and that's not a moonshiner, which is how he started out. Just like everybody else around here. Lots of folks made moonshine out here. Still do, actually. Any questions? Jack was like a philanthropist. He helped out local churches. He's known to help out local farmers that he knows down in Lexington. Everybody knows everybody around here. It's a small community. We're all close-knit, and you know, before he got out, if somebody is having trouble on the farm, he'd pay them a little extra when they'd come and All right, y'all. This is Jack's office. It's the oldest building at the distillery. This is Jasper Newton himself. Now, Jack, some people say he died a happy man, depends on how you look at it, because he was a lifelong bachelor. He never married. He did have seven girlfriends that we know of. One cousin, he was anti-social. He might have been a little too social, but we don't know that for sure, but we do know that he never married, and he didn't have any children. Now, Jack was the tenth of ten kids. He had nine brothers and sisters, and one of those brothers and sisters, one of those sisters, Fenetta, or Nettie Daniels, gave Jack Lemontlow, or Lemuel Montlow, and Jack called him Lemmy, and his nephew, Felix Montlow, and Nettie Daniels. Now, he started working for Jack when he was 10 years old to help out on the family farm, and from 10 to 17, he worked on Jack's farm. From 17 on, he came down here, and he worked at the distillery, and that's where he's at pretty much all his life. His first job was cutting down the trees for the charcoal. He made the charcoal, and then later on, somebody taught him how to keep the books here, and that's what he did from then on out until he owned the place. Now, Jack would work old Lem hard, and people called Jack on that and said, why do you work your sister's kids hard for? You don't have to. He said, well, I work Lemmy, because Jack called him Lemmy. I work Lemmy hard because I know he knows one of these days, I'm going to give him the place, and Jack was true to his word. In 1908, he gave him the place. Him and a guy named Jake Daniels, which was another nephew that worked here at the distillery, and they ran it up until 1909. They ran it somewhere in the neighborhood 1908 to 1920. Then we had that fatal social experiment here in the U.S. called Prohibition, right? We weren't supposed to make any whiskey here then. We might have looked. Now, there is a clause in there that in the Prohibition that you can make it for medicinal purposes, and everybody knows whiskey's good for you, so they might make a little for conditional purposes, but we weren't making a whole lot. So he ran that hardware store, okay, that you see on the square, and he also raised horses and raced mules, or raced mules and raced horses. And that's what he did during Prohibition. By 1938, Prohibition got repealed in this area, and it was a dry county still. We couldn't sell whiskey here, but we could make it, which was good enough. We started making it in 1938. Lem was 64 when he started again, and from 1938 to 47, he ran the distillery. He died in 1947 and passed it along to those four gentlemen back there. They're all Vanderbilt educated young men. Those are his sons, and they ran it from 1947 to 1956. And in 1956, they sold us the brown corn for 20 million dollars, and that's in our office today. The third market share, we have about 85 percent of it. We're the number one selling whiskey in the world, but I ain't no kidding. Okay, now this right here is the safe that killed Jack. Anybody ever heard the myth or the legend? Jack, there's a little bit of a moral to this story and some irony. Jack got to work early one morning. As a general rule, Jack never got to work early. It was always Lem's job. He was always here. He always had the safe open ready for Jack to start the proceedings. Well, Jack got up to work early. We don't know why. I think he was getting ready to go sell some whiskey up in Nashville, which he did regularly. So he come up here, and he needed a letter out of this safe, and he's trying to get it open. Lem ain't here to open it for him, so he's trying to get it on his own. He thought he did a combination. He kept messing with it. He tried a bunch, and he failed, and it got him frustrated. He kicked the safe as hard as he could. That was the beginning of the end for old Jack, because Jack didn't know at the time that he broke the big toe on his left foot. Well, he was wobbling around in here, and in walks Lem, comes over, opens the safe up like it was nothing. He gets in there and gets his letter. He didn't tell Lem that he had just hurt his foot or what had happened for a little while after that. Well, it took him about a week, but he finally had to go to the doctor, and the doctor told him the gangrene had set in. He was going to have to amputate that toe, and that was in 1905. For the next six years, they amputated different parts of that leg on up to his final operation in around October, where they cut his leg off at the hip. By that time, the infection had become systemic, and Jack died October 9, 1911. He was 61 years old. Now, Jack wasn't going to live forever. Nobody does. He might have lived a little longer. Hey, I got to work early that morning to keep that safe. So, what's the moral of the story? Don't get to work early. Don't get to work early. That's the real moral of the story. It never seems to work for me around here when I'm running late, but, you know, say, hey, look, it killed Jack. Any questions? Now, Jack Daniels is like a health food product. We only got five ingredients all over natural. Corn, barley, and rye. We use that K Springs water out there. Yeast that is proprietary to the lim-motlo that we make here. Same strain heat, and some of the fermentation from the last process, and that's all we use to make our whiskey. We don't have any artificial sugars, colors, preservatives, or anything. It's all natural. Water, grain, and the barrel. Any questions? Jack's motto was, every day we make it, we'll make the best we can, and we follow that today. Now, Jack's only ever had seven master distillers. Oh, excuse me. That's Jack right there. He was the first. Then we have Jeff Motlo. That's Jack's nephew. Then we got Lynn Tolley. That's Jack's grandnephew. Then we got Mr. Gamble. Mr. Gamble was too tall. He didn't rank a drop. I've always thought it's a paradox. If you were a master distiller at a whiskey distillery, you didn't actually rank the product, but so they said he did. Now, this is Mr. Bobo. Mr. Bobo is our master distiller. He's still alive. He's one of our master distillers, and he's 94 years old. This right here is Jimmy Bedford, and this gentleman right here is Jeff Harnett out of Jackson, Tennessee. He's our current master distiller. Nice guy. He does a fine job. Any questions? All right, y'all. Follow me out. We're going to go over here and see the other stuff. We get 150 truckloads a week of corn, barley, and rye, okay? We got 12 of those silos. Now, this is our steel house. We're going to go up in there, but it's kind of hot today, so I'm going to talk to you out here about what that does. Then I'll give you the Reader's Digest version upstairs because we're making whiskey today. It's kind of noisy up there, okay? So this is our steel house. It says so right there. We got four steels. They're continuous column steels, okay? Two large are in the center. The two smalls are on the end. The two large produce 35 to 40 gallons a minute. Two smalls, 12 to 14 gallons a minute. They're made out of 100% copper. Inside of them, they got shells with 100% copper. When we go in there, you'll see a tube or a pipe going up alongside the steel. You'll see a little window in that. There's a yellow substance going in through there if they're instilling, and that's sour mash. It's fermented. It's got alcohol in it. We got to get that alcohol out, so what do we do? No, not yet. We get the alcohol that way, but you wouldn't want it when we get it out. So what do we do? We pop that mash to the top of the steel, then we force it down. As it comes down, we force steam up. That steam cooks the alcohol out of the mash, turns it into a vapor. Vapor rises, right? Simple physics. When it gets to the top, we collect it in the condenser up there. If you know how to make moonshine, it's called a thumper with a worm, and then we condense that vapor back down into a liquid. You'll see that liquid coming down through a box right next to basically the pipe, and it's called the try box. The try box is where our tasters come and try the whiskey. We do everything by taste here. One of our main quality controls is taste, so when they taste it and they feel this is right, everything's going good, okay? Any questions? How often do they taste it? They taste it about on the hour. Now, everybody wants to be a taster. They think that's a great job, but you don't get to keep the whiskey. You got to spit it out. We sell it to local cattle farmers, cattle feed. Now, it's got five percent alcohol in it. We couldn't get the alcohol out. We tried, trust me, but we couldn't. So, you know that ad campaign that California's got happy cows? Nah, we got real happy cows around here. We marinate them from the inside out on the hood. When you go home, because you got two directions, southeast, northeast, northwest, southwest, northeast. Look in the fields as you go by the farmer's fields. If they're laying on their side, they're kind of wonky, tilted like that. You know they had their mass today, but it makes a really healthy cow. It's really fat, really good meat. Also, that's what makes this a Tennessee Sipping Whiskey. When it goes in, it's about 140 proof pour liquid, and when it comes out, it's a Tennessee Sipping Whiskey. That's what distinguishes it. It takes five days to make bourbon. It takes 10 days to make Jack Daniel's. The fermenters, it takes about 45 minutes to distill it, and it comes over here for another five days. Like I said, it takes one drop five days to get to the bottom. It goes in as clear as it comes out. Jack Daniel's is distillery number one. Now, we're not bragging because we're the number one whiskey seller in the world, even though we are. What that means is that that denotes that we're the oldest registered distillery in the United States. Jack Daniel's registered us in 1866. He was 16 years old, right after the Civil War. Now, this right here is the oldest barrel house at the distillery. It was built in 1938, okay, by Lamb Montlowe. It's the only one with the brick facade. You get all the pictures you want on it right here. Just when we go inside, we can't take the pictures inside here in the first part. You can take pictures in here all you want. This is our tasting room. We have been using these since July 16th, okay, so, or 15th, I'm sorry, and we're the only one in the world. I'm just going to get you to get a picture of it. Okay, now, the taste. This is a tasting. It's not a whiskey shoot. It's a whiskey. If you want to shoot your whiskey, it's your whiskey. Look on the back of these cards. There's tasting wheels. Each whiskey, it's in front of the whiskey that you're going to be tasting. Just look at it, and on the back here, you can write down comments and stuff, what you think about it, and how it tasted, and what flavors it meets in that wheel to you, okay? All right, so, what we're going to do is we're going to pick the whiskey up. We're going to look at it and just shake it around to get a good feel for the color. We'll do that here in a second. I'm just going to and then we want to smell it. Give it the smell of it. And then we're going to taste it. When you taste it, pull the tip of your tongue and let it roll back. You engage your flavor, your taste buds more that way. You get more of the actual taste of it, okay? All right, so, we're going to get started with Sinatra. Sinatra is one of the medicines. We're going to go from left to right, okay, enough to stand alone, so we don't really talk about it, anything to mix them with. You can mix them with anything you'd like, of course, but we like to think that they just stand by themselves. Let's go ahead and pick it up and get a smell for it. Now, this is named in honor of Frank Sinatra, and it comes in this barrel right here. So, this is the, basically, the essence of Jack Daniels. It's not Jack, it's Pierce Jr., let's get that. So, go ahead and get your smell for it. Get some of the barrel spice in there. This is called caramel vanilla. Get some smoke, of course, and go ahead and get your taste. Now, be sure to write this down. So, you can taste the caramel vanilla in there. It smells like a barrel house in there. Taste some wood, and you'll get some barrel spice in there, okay? A little peppery taste. The peppery is the rye. We put that, that's what Jack used it for. Now, all this starts out with 8% corn, 12% barley, and 8% rye, okay? That's what we get. It's all the same. It's a black leather.