Hanging out with Uncle Jack

We finally made it to Uncle Jack’s house and boy was it worth the wait! Epic is probably the only true word to describe how cool that tour was- Bruce (our tour guide) singled us out as the only two would try to make off with a barrel.(They are 550 pounds full) Then again, we were the youngest people on the tour surprisingly. Bruce gave a very cool tour and we got to experience every part of the Jack Daniel’s production. We were lucky enough (according to Bruce) to see them actually making the charcoal that Jack is filtered through (which is the expensive part that makes Jack a Tennessee Whiskey we hear) and got to see the filtering, barreling, and bottling process first hand. The safe that ultimately killed Jack was there as well and we gave it a good kick ourselves as well.  🙂 Even though there was a good deal of walking through the tour, it was amazing to see how little the process has changed over the years over the large part of land the distillery is on. Due to the dry county law, there are no tastings at the actual distillery which makes a compelling argument why someone should pick up a bottle there. We also learned that every employee gets a bottle of Jack the first friday of every month which is pretty cool. We actually got to see the Master Distillery pass by as well!

To add to the awesomeness both my lucky number and my birthday was part of the entire tour. They use 33 pieces of wood to make every barrel body that is fit together by hand. If you have somewhere between $9000-$12000 you can actually buy a single barrel of Whiskey (240 bottles) and they give you the barrel with the 40 cases of hand bottled Single Barrel Whiskey. They call the Single Barrel club and everyone who has purchase a barrel or more (such as the US military or Costco) is on the wall.

So we decided to both pick up a bottle of single barrel that is only sold at the distillery itself. Turns out that the bottles we bought was bottled on my birthday of last year- 9/30/2009. A very cool ending to a great start of another 700+ mile day! Check out the pictures below- I’ll see you in Nashville in a couple hours!