The House That Jack Built

Tennessee got a bad rap with me because it was the place where I discovered I was broke. So I had to try extra hard to make it fun. This began by going to the Jack Daniels Distillery, of course!

If you ever go to Tennessee, I highly recommend hitting up Lynchburg. Well, okay, maybe not Lynchburg - it’s a dry town (a dry town with the most famous whiskey factory ever!) and there’s really not much to do except buy Jack Daniels souvenirs, but the distillery itself is really interesting. And it’s FREE! Screw “love”, “free” is my new favorite word. There is a museum there, where you can learn all about the early days of Jack Daniels, and then the factory tour is just as awesome. The guide will take you inside the distillery and let you stick your face inside the fermentation vats! You could get drunk on the smell alone, it’s very strong. Actually, some little boys tagging along with their parents had their shirt collars pulled up over their noses for most of the tour. Each new room we walked into, they would sigh, “EWWWW, it stinks!” Personally, I thought it smelled awesome, like maple syrup and whiskey soaked up with warm cornbread. I wanted to scoop a fingerful of the mash and taste it, but I didn’t feel like paying for a full 5,000 gallon vat of ruined Jack Daniels. Jameson, maybe, but not JD.

Some interesting facts about Jack Daniels:

- He stood only 5'2" tall and wore a size 6 shoe. There is an Italian marble statue of Jack Daniels in the lobby/museum of the visitor’s center, but that statue stands 5'8" tall and wears a size 9 shoe - because a size 6 shoe would not be able to support the weight of Italian marble.

- He died of an infection that started when he was trying to open a safe in his office and couldn’t. He had gotten to work early and the man with the key would not be there for hours, so Jack kicked the safe. In doing so, he broke a toe, which became infected, causing him to lose his whole leg, and eventually he died of blood poisoning stemming from that injury. The safe is still in his office to this day. The moral of the story - don’t bother getting to work early, it’ll kill you!

- Jack Daniels started apprenticing as a whiskey maker at the age of seven and bought his first distillery when he was only 13!

- He would only allow 99 bushels of corn to be processed each day to escape a higher tax bracket. If he had processed 100 or more, the distillery would have had to file as a different type of business.

I loved the tour! The only thing that made me sad was all the graffiti on the barrels in the warehouse from other visitors to the factory. It’s like, must we all know that Karisha and Nicole wuz here, ‘02? Or that Mickey loves Angela? I mean, a bathroom wall I can allow, but these are barrels of whiskey. That’s almost a sacrilege.