The Jack Daniel's distillery is located in an upright God-fearing area of Tennessee where not a drop of alcohol can be legally consumed, writes BRIAN BOYD
JACK DANIEL’S whiskey everywhere, but not a drop to drink. The tiny village of Lynchburg which is tucked away in the valleys of southern Tennessee is a shrine to the famous whiskey brand, but you can’t drink anything stronger than iced tea in the village as it is slap bang in the middle of a dry county.
Basically, just a simple square that looks like it hasn’t been touched since the 19th century, Lynchburg (population: 400 at a push) boasts more Jack Daniel’s memorabilia than you would have thought possible – T-shirts, leather trousers, key rings, soap etc – but in this upright God fearin’ area of Tennessee, not a drop of alcohol can be legally consumed.
“I’m sorry sir, but we’re just a simple and sober village,” comes the polite reply when I ask for a whiskey-infused pick-me-up to counter the jet lag. Purely medicinal and all that.
An hour and a half drive southeast from the country music shrine that is Nashville, the splendid isolation of Lynchburg is regularly disturbed by small armies of Harley Davidson bikers who would regard the home of Jack Daniel’s as their Mecca.
And just as fanatics dress up as Mickey Mouse when they visit Disneyland, so do bikers and whiskey fans for the Jack Daniel's distillery tour. Wearing T-shirts and baseball caps with the whiskey's trademark logo, visitors take the short five-minute walk from downtown Lynchburg to the JD plant which is spread over 500 acres and looks like something from Little House on the Prairie.
Whether a drinker or not – or even whiskey-lover or hater – the guided tour (which is free) is both enjoyable and informative. A lot of this is down to the truly stunning setting, but also to the sardonic humour and wry asides of your guide for the day.
As iconic in it’s own way as Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel’s has built up an association over the years with bikers and rock and blues bands. But it was also Frank Sinatra’s drink of choice – as Dean Martin supposedly once remarked: “I wasn’t responsible for introducing Frank to Jack Daniel’s, but I sure was responsible for keeping him on it.”
The tour begins with a tasting session in which the man responsible for approving the whiskey really goes deep into detail about the different processes used to produce the Old Number 7, the Single Barrel and the Gentleman Jack varieties. Southern-style hospitality here means your “samples” are actually quite generous measures so you can get a good buzz going before hopping on one of the buses to transport you around the distillery.
There really was a Jack Daniel we learn – he opened the distillery here in 1886 (which makes it not just the oldest registered distillery in the US but also a national historic site). He chose this particular site because of the iron-free cave spring water which whizzes through the plant. A statue of Daniel himself stands guard over this prized spring.
Not surprisingly, Daniel had Irish and Scottish ancestry but he came to a messy end. He arrived to work here one day in 1911 (when he was 65) and when he couldn’t remember the combination lock of the safe in his office he kicked it in anger. He developed an infection in his foot and later died of blood poisoning. There was no one around to help him as Daniel typically arrived in work hours before anyone else did.
You can stand in Daniel’s old office and give the same safe a little kick yourself as the tour guide ironically points out that if only he had soaked his wound in whiskey it might well have cleaned it up. His death was once the subject of a marketing poster campaign with the slogan: “Moral of Jack’s Death: Never go to work early.”
The tour proper begins with a video about the plant and the whiskey process, which is all very well, but it’s only when you get outside and into the massive green warehouses that you really appreciate the care, attention and patience that goes into a bottle of Jack.
You get to see the charcoal presses that the whiskey is passed through to give it its distinctive “mellow” taste and how the corn mash is cooked, fermented and distilled.
The making of the oak barrels, which give the whiskey its characteristic amber colour, is displayed and while all this exhibiting is going on, the distillery’s 300 or so employees are milling around working on current batches waiting to be bottled.
Because most of the tour is outdoors and you’re never too far away from the caves and spring water, there is never a “men in white coats with test tubes” feel to the tour and you can ask as many questions as you like. You can snap away with your mobile phone camera, but certain crucial areas of the plant can’t be photographed.
The whole tour takes the best part of two hours and at the end you get the strange experience of standing in a warehouse with hundreds of barrels of Tennessee whiskey knowing that the Jack Daniel’s served up in bars and clubs in Moscow, Melbourne and Malaga all come from this one big room.
There is the obligatory gift shop at the end (with lashings of complimentary home-made lemonade) and despite this being a dry county you can buy special commemorative bottles of the whiskey.
Not particularly wanting to see what the punishment might be for flagrantly drinking alcohol in a dry county, I waited until I was safely inside a “wet county” before getting to welcome grips with a “Lynchburg Lemonade”, which is part Jack Daniel’s, part triple sec, part “sour mix” (whatever that is) and part lemon-lime soda. The forbidden fruit of a strong drink after a few hours in a dry county was all the sweeter.
* The Jack Daniel’s distillery tour runs from 8am to 4pm every day. All further information on jackdaniels.com/thedistillery. Be sure not to miss a leisurely lunch in Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House in Lynchburg before taking the tour.