Old Number 7

We arrived in Lynchburg, TN at probably 4:25.  Immediately when we stepped out of the car we could smell the goodness in the air.  Not a fresh air smell, not a spring flowery type smell, not a fresh rain smell, nope, that was whiskey in the air.  Maybe that’s why we keep coming back.  We had been here before so had we missed the tour, it would not have been the end of the world, but we did in fact end up making the last tour of the day.  We joined the tour group just as they were getting ready to take a group picture.  The tour of this distillery is well worth the price (free).  Actually we would gladly pay for this tour if they charged for it.  The tour is about an hour long and they take you along through every step of the whiskey making process.  They start you in the rickyard.  A rick is a 4 foot by 4 foot by 4 foot stack of wood, in this case sugar maple.  They burn these stacks of wood, making charcoal which they eventually filter the whiskey through.  That is one of the things that makes it so good!  This is also what makes the whiskey different from bourbon.

Rickyard furnace with stacks of ricks all around:

Charcoal left over from burning the wood which the whiskey will filter through:

They use fresh spring water which is naturally filtered through the limestone in the ground to make the whiskey.  Below is a picture of the source of the spring, you can see it behind the bronze sculpture of Jack Daniels himself.  You could say the picture is of Jack on the rocks.

We completed the tour, being that it was late in the day, the bottling process was over with and we were only able to see a short video of the bottling process.  During the tour Chris did get scolded for taking pictures inside one of the buildings, even after the tour guide told everyone no photography was allowed inside the buildings.  Chris didn’t hear him say that, nor did Chris see the big sign with the camera with a red cross through it.  Probably because he was more interested in the whiskey.  We did take a few more outside pictures including one of the trees which have black bark, apparently because of the high amount of carbon dioxide in the air from the booze making process.  We also got a picture of the world’s largest bottle of Jack, which was inside the gift shop and in one of the pictures, up on the hill, is one of the giant warehouses where they age the whiskey.  They can store about a million gallons of whiskey in one of those barrel houses, and they have about 80 barrel houses.  The tour guide mentioned that the US Gov’t taxes the whiskey at the rate of $13.50 per gallon.  If you do the math you’ll see that we will never experience prohibition again.  It is also interesting to know that the distillery is in a dry county.  A dry county sells no alcohol.  As a result the distillery is not allowed to server samples at the end as other distilleries do.

We then started driving back to Huntsville, only 45 miles away.  Chris took the scenic route, through mostly rolling farmland and some hilly terrain along single lane backroads.  Once we got back into Alabama the roads were as straight as can be for miles.  They weren’t flat so you couldn’t see for miles, but the roads out there do not curve at all.  Today was also the one year anniversary of some really bad, powerful tornadoes that hit the area.  Many people were killed, the facility where Chris worked this week was even closed for a week due to having no power.  As we drove down some of these roads we saw, even a year later a lot of destruction.  Besides the trees that were snapped in half, we saw a few places where there were mailboxes on the side of the road but only either piles of rubble or just empty foundations where houses stood a year ago.  On the positive side, we got a good view of the setting sun and we took a cool picture of some mist covering a field.

Our last stop was something we had been craving all week.  Hushpuppies for dinner.  Hushpuppies are basically deep fried pieces of corn meal.  Hushpuppies are very popular in the South.  You occasionally see them outside of the South but they are never as good as they are down here.  According to Wikipedia, the name hushpuppies is often attributed to hunters, fishermen or other cooks who would fry some basic cornmeal mixture and feed it to their dogs to "hush the puppies" during cook-outs or fish-fries.  Other hush puppy legends purport to date the etymology of the term "hushpuppies" to the Civil War.  Union soldiers are claimed to have tossed fried cornbread to quell the barks of Confederate dogs.  Who cares if this is dog food, it is really good and for $3 a dozen you can’t go wrong!

Tomorrow we head for the Atlanta area.