The Wednesday before Xandra started orientation, we decided to take advantage our dwindling days of freedom and head out to the Jack Daniel's distillery in Lynchburg. I can tell we're already growing accustomed to living somewhere other than Texas, because the one hour trip seemed interminable. After taking an interstate out of Nashville, we had to turn onto smaller and smaller roads through progressively smaller towns on the way to the distillery. We did get to drive through Shelbyville, though, home of the Tennessee Walking Horse, which will likely be the subject of a future blog post. But I'm convinced the last state highway/farm road interchange actually plunges through some time-space anomaly or outer ring of Hell. If I'm not mistaken, mile markers are supposed to increment, either up or down depending on your direction of travel, to indicate progress on a particular stretch of road, right? So how does this highway have multiple mile marker #1's? I kept thinking we were about to reach the end of this dinky little road, but no! Like some slow-drip torture device, we keep passing mile #1 roughly a mile after we saw the last one. Maybe the locals like messing with the tourists. Maybe this is indicative of the education system in rural Tennessee. Whatever. There's whiskey to be made.
The town of Lynchburg appears to consist of three things: the distillery, a small town square, and scattered houses in the hills around them. As it was past our lunch time when we arrived, we went to the square first to find food. We settled on the BarBQue Caboose Cafe an unspectacular barbecue place (we miss you, Rudy's), but we have plans to go to Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House the next time we go. Apparently you need to get reservations several months in advance to eat there as seating is quite limited.
And we're definitely going back because the distillery was awesome. The visitor's center looks like an old ranch home with a big wraparound porch lined with high-backed Jack Daniel's branded rocking chairs. If I had a bigger car, Xandra and I would have stolen two of them for our patio. There's a nice waiting area with a life-size (dude was very short; I think 5'2") stone statue of Jack Daniel and an overview of the distillery's history and the distilling process. But the tour itself is definitely worth the wait.
Our tour guide was a trip. I can't remember her name, but she had a thick Southern accent and a mixture of bemusement and weariness at having to give the same spiel for probably the 20th time that day. She also looked like she could put away some whiskey; I think she's just in it for the booze. Lynchburg is in a dry county, so no one in the area is actually allowed to sell the whiskey they make (with the small exception of a special bottle only the distillery can sell). To atone for this, the distillery has "Good Friday" for its employees. Basically, that means that everyone gets a pint of whiskey just for showing up to work that day. Hard to argue with the perks.
They bus you up to the top of the hill the distillery inhabits. This is where they keep the wood that is eventually turned into charcoal for the distillery. They have palette after palette of stacked wood and a place to burn it. Wisely, not far away, they built a garage for their two classic fire trucks, though something tells me these antiques wouldn't be much good against a real blaze anymore. As we continued down the hill, we stopped in to see the natural spring where the water in Jack Daniel's whiskey comes from. Due to filtering through the rock in the hill, the water is very pure and clean, even if my picture doesn't look like it. Just outside the spring is another statue of Jack Daniel's, this one a bit larger for vanity's sake.
In front of the spring is Daniel's original office, a three room house that's now essentially a museum. The centerpiece is the rusty old safe that once held Mr. Daniel's massive profits and eventually killed him in a malicious act of sitting there where Jack might be tempted to kick it. You read that correctly. Jack Daniel kicked his safe. He broke his foot. The injury got infected, which turned to gangrene, which put Daniel six feet under. To my knowledge, the safe was never charged in the crime.
From there, the tour wound its way through several buildings where whiskey was made onsite. We saw the vats of mash that were fermenting alcohol, we saw the ten-foot charcoal cylinders where they filtered out all of the impurities (what comes out is "distiller's beer," a perfectly clear and highly concentrated alcohol), and we saw where they bottled single-barrel whiskey. It may not be clear from the pictures, but the tower of back-lit bottles is in a room full of honorary plaques. If you buy an entire barrel's worth of single-barrel whiskey, you get a plaque in that room; each additional barrel purchased is noted on the plaque. Most of the buyers tend to be stores and chains, but we were happy to find some notable individuals like Clint Black (or maybe it was George Strait... maybe both; I'm sure they both love their whiskey) had a plaque on the wall. Xandra and I were almost left behind on the tour because we were fascinated by reading the plaques and watching them bottle it in the next room.
We'll try to catch up on some of our other adventures later.
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