Jack Daniels: From prohibition to promotion

More than a decade before he became the first assistant master distiller of Jack Daniel’s (JD) in 2014, Chris Fletcher was a tour guide at the Lynchburg, Tennessee, distillery. Perhaps that’s why he knows so many stories around the 149-year-old whiskey maker. Or maybe it’s because his maternal grandfather, Frank Bobo, was its fifth master distiller. At a recent JD masterclass in New Delhi, Fletcher told this cautionary tale: A little before prohibition started in Tennessee in 1908—the ban on production and sale of alcohol across the US wouldn’t start till 12 years later—Jack Daniel came into work early. He wanted to open this big, heavy safe in his office. But it was jammed and there was no one around to help yet. Daniel kicked the safe in frustration, and hurt his size-4 foot. The injury became infected and he eventually died of blood poisoning in 1911.

Moral of the story: Never come to work early; it could kill you, says Fletcher. The stories, of course, didn’t end there. In an interview, Fletcher shared more anecdotes around JD, and spoke about charcoal mellowing and how he became associated with the JD Sinatra Select whiskey from start to finish. Edited excerpts:

What is the difference between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey?

Tennessee whiskey is actually a close relative of bourbon. Both have to have at least 51% corn in the recipe. They can’t have more than 80% alcohol. And there is a federal regulation that a brand-new oak barrel has to be used (for ageing) each time. Where it differs is in charcoal mellowing.

So what goes on at the JD distillery?

There is 80% corn in our recipe—the rest is rye and malted barley. We cook the corn with spring water to make grits. Put in some old mash (it contains yeast), much like you do with sourdough bread to get a more consistent produce. Once the mixture cools, we add malted barley—this cuts through that huge ball of starch like a pair of scissors so the yeast can feed off it. When the yeast consumes the starch, the waste products are alcohol and carbon dioxide. This takes three-four days. At the end of it, what we have is distiller’s beer, which has 11-12% alcohol.

The next step is to pump this sour mash into a copper still (there are four stills at JD, each one is 5ft in diameter and 40ft high). Every 2ft inside the stills, there is a perforated plate of copper—this slows the sour mash coming down. Steam at a 212 degrees Fahrenheit comes up from the bottom and hits the mash. The steam cooks the mash out and the alcohol comes out as hot steam. We capture that—it’s clear as water at this point.

And then we pass it through 10ft of tightly packed charcoal (JD has 70 such mellowing vats at any point in time).

And this is charcoal mellowing?

Yes, this is a Tennessee whiskey process. You charcoal-mellow the whiskey before putting it in barrels. Technically, this could be a small chunk of charcoal.

Every year, we spend over $1 million just on charcoal. There are two full-time employees whose only job is to make charcoal with hard sugar maple wood. Charcoal works as a filter. What it pulls out is flavours like corn which tastes like cereal—a grainy, grassy flavour you get in some younger bourbons.

You follow a recipe that’s more than 100 years old. Is there room for innovation at JD?

The day I make whiskey that tastes different from my grandfather’s (Frank Bobo’s) is the day I’ll get fired.

That said, we are always looking at potential new products. It takes four-six years to make any whiskey, so by nature we can’t be fast in the way that technology companies are. The Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey whiskey took many years (to come to market). And every time we try a new product, we need to test for quality and also ask if it is true to our heritage.

Tell us about a new idea you’ve been part of at JD.

We are (continually) experimenting with our barrels. The barrel is like an ingredient, like a tea bag, it accounts for 60% of the flavour and gives the whiskey its amber colour. In 2003, I was working in one of our two cooperages in Louisville, northern Alabama. I was pretty low on the totem pole, and I was cutting grooves into barrels (to increase the surface area) by hand. The grooves spiralled all the way from the top to the bottom of the barrel. That barrel was used for the Jack Daniel’s Sinatra Select which was launched last year—we worked closely with (singing legend) Frank Sinatra’s family and foundation to make it. I happened to be part of making this whiskey from start to finish—it was pretty cool.

There are so many pop culture references and rock stars associated with the brand. How did that happen?

We never paid any of them; whether it was Mick Jagger placing a glass on the amplifier or Frank Sinatra preferring it to anything else. The Sinatra story actually goes back to a marketing manager called Angelo Lucasi who was hired by the Motlow family (Lem Motlow, Jack’s nephew, who inherited the distillery along with Dick Daniel after Jack died in 1911). Lucasi found out that Sinatra loved our whiskey. After that, he would send Sinatra a bottle wherever he was giving a concert.

It is pretty cool. I get to taste whiskey 30-40 times a day—you don’t drink it, you spit it out, but it’s still pretty cool. I get to travel a lot.

Where all have you been so far?

Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, France, Mexico, and I am travelling to Israel next.

What’s the weirdest JD cocktail you’ve come across in all your travels?

In Japan, they mix the Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey with milk. When they asked me try it, I thought, “Oh no, this can’t possibly go well”. There’s a cold version and a hot version. I tried it, and it was creamy and delicious.

What happened at JD during the prohibition years?

All the whiskey from before the prohibition was destroyed. We still have the mash from before the prohibition, though.

From Jack, the distillery passed to Jack’s cousin Dick Daniel and his nephew Lem Motlow. Sometime during the 30-year ban on the production of alcohol in Tennessee (you still can’t buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in Lynchburg today; it is part of Moore, a dry county), Dick thought the distillery would never produce another drop of alcohol and sold his half to Motlow for $500. Today, we process 1.3 million pounds of grain a day; that is equal to roughly 150,000 gallons of whiskey.

After the ban was lifted, Motlow made whiskey again. But he aged it for just one year—he had to put up all the money to make it upfront and then his investment was just sitting there in barrels. JD made that one-year-old whiskey (recipe) well into the 1980s.

There was only one other time when JD stopped making whiskey since 1866, and that was when the government put corn on ration during World War II.