Murfreesboro, TN

We went to tour the Jack Daniel's Distillery today.

This is the visitors center.  They have daily free tours, very interesting.  They still make the whiskey the old fashioned way.  Here is another link for Jack Daniel's since you need to be 21 to go to the other one, just in case there are minors looking at this blog..

Jack Daniel was a very small man, he stood only 5'2".  He started in the whiskey business when he was 7.  He bought the distillery when he was a teenager from the preacher he worked.

One of the things that makes Jack Daniel's Whiskey different is that it is filtered through charcoal.  They make the charcoal by burning aged white oak and putting out the fire with water before it all turns to ashes.  You can see two stacks of the wood here.  Most whiskeys are aged in barrels that have been burned, but this one is aged in new barrels and only used once.  Most of their used barrels are sold to distilleries in Scotland.

The reason Jack Daniel started a distillery here is because of the water.  There is a spring that is filtered through shale and contains no iron.

Here are the 3 major ingredients added to the water.  Once the whiskey is put into barrells, its aged for anywhere from 4 to 6 years.  The time is determined by tasters.

This is the safe that killed Jack Daniel.  At the age of 61 he came to work one morning, went to open the safe, couldn't get it open so he kicked it breaking his tow.  Gangreen set in, had part of his leg amputated, ultimately died of infection.  With what medicine knows today, he was probably diebetic.

When we were going from one building to another, we had a visitor.  He was right there on the hot top (it was raining) and didn't seem to be bothered by the people around.

We had other visitors at different times going from building to building.  I was able to get this picture at the end of the tour as we were headed back to the visitors center.  There were probably a dozen of them.