Tennessee Whiskey
It
takes a lot to be Straight Bourbon Whiskey.
There
are rules about what grains can and must go into the mash,
rules about how strong it can be coming off the still, how
strong it has to be going in the barrel, how strong it has
to be to be bottled. There are rules about the kind of wood
used to make the barrels, and how many times a barrel can be
used (once!), and how the wood must be charred before
filling. There are rules about how long it must be aged in
that barrel, and how that age can be presented on the label.
And there dare not be any added coloring, flavoring, or
aromas in bourbon whiskey.
If
you balk at any one of these rules, you may have made
whiskey, but it’s not bourbon whiskey. It’s complicated,
finicky stuff. Now, take all those finicky rules, plus all
the other stuff bourbon distillers do just because it works
– like sour mash fermentation, the particular kind of corn
they use, limestone water, copper in the still, and the
complicated feng shui of building warehouses – take all
that, I said, pack it in a big box, and take it down to
Tennessee, around Tullahoma. (“Tullahoma,” the woman at my
motel said, “is from the Indian words ‘tulla’, what means
‘mud’, and ‘homa’, what means ‘more mud’.”)
STANDING
Jack
Daniel master distiller Jimmy Bedford
INSERT George
Dickel master distiller David Backus
Open
that big bourbon box up and set up all that whiskey-making
equipment and warehouses and rules . . . then add one more
big step, and you’re finally ready to make Tennessee
whiskey, the kind they make at the Jack Daniel Distillery
and at the George Dickel Distillery. Because in addition to
all the other stuff bourbon distillers do, at Daniel and
Dickel they slowly filter every single drop of their whiskey
(or whisky, as they spell it at Dickel) through ten feet of
sugar maple charcoal, what they call charcoal mellowing, or
as it used to be called, The Lincoln County
Process.
The Lincoln
County Process is crucial to Tennessee whiskey. But don’t
confuse it with the chill-filtering you may have heard of
used on other whiskeys prior to bottling, done to clear the
whiskey of harmless proteins and fatty acids that could
cause cloudiness if the whiskey got cold. And we’ re not
talking about the rough filtering that takes place when a
barrel of aged bourbon is dumped – that’s just to keep any
chunks of char that may break off the inside of the barrel
out of your bottle of whiskey. The important part of the
Lincoln County Process is the timing: the whiskey is
charcoal mellowed before it goes into the barrel, an
additional step inserted in the whiskey-making process that
isn’t followed by bourbon distillers.
The Process
may sound simple: run new make off the still through ten
feet of charcoal. But George Dickel master distiller David
Backus says that “The Lincoln County Process can ruin good
whisky, and it can’t make bad whisky good.” There’s a lot
more than meets the eye here.
What meets
the eye first is the fire. Charcoal mellowing doesn’t mean
running the whiskey through a pile of Kingsford briquettes –
both Daniel and Dickel burn their own charcoal. They use
sugar maple wood, and not just any sugar maple. “We’re
looking for sugar maple trees that grow in gladey areas,”
said Jack Daniel master distiller Jimmy Bedford. “You get an
abundance of ply in those shady areas.” Ply is the number of
layers in a tree, the ‘growth rings’. Trees grow more slowly
in shady areas, so there are more rings per inch. More rings
means more cellular wall, more cellular walls means more
little pockets in the charcoal to catch what needs to be
caught.
The sugar
maple wood is cut in the fall to avoid sap pockets that can
flare and explode, then air-dried. It is stacked loosely in
square piles called ricks, about six feet high, with plenty
of open space for cross-ventilation. Then the workers spray
it with alcohol – something they’ve got plenty of, just
laying around – and set it on fire.
Charcoal
burners usually bury the wood, smouldering it for days with
small vents at top and bottom. That’s the way it’s been done
for thousands of years. That’s not the program with the
Lincoln County Process. The wood for whiskey is burned right
out in the open, under high metal hoods that serve to funnel
the smoke away from the burning ricks. I found a charcoal
expert, Dr. Peter J. F. Harris, a British Professor who
studies charcoal’s microstructure. He was not completely
familiar with the Lincoln County Process, though he had
heard of it, and he speculated that since “many volatile
compounds will be released when wood is heated to high
temperatures, some of them harmful, notably methanol,”
open-air burning served to keep those compounds out of the
charcoal to be used in the Process.
So instead
of controlling the fire by the slow, largely self-regulating
effect of burying it in earth, the burn is controlled by
carefully-timed and aimed sprays of water. Not too much – or
the fire might miss burning some of the wood – and not too
little – which would burn the wood to ash instead of the
cellular-structured charcoal. In about three hours, four
ricks are reduced to a hot bed of coals, and the fire is
extinguished. The charcoal is broken up to the size of a
large garden pea, cooled, and taken to the mellowing
sheds.
Five-foot
wide vats, ten feet deep, are filled with those bits of
charcoal, and the new-make whiskey, clear as water (or white
lightning), drips down onto them and makes its slow way down
through the bed, through a plain white virgin wool blanket.
“The charcoal will last about six months,” said Bedford. But
that decision isn’t made based on a mark on the calendar.
When the whiskey stops tasting right coming out the bottom
of the vat, Bedford makes the call to replace the bed. Not
every drop comes back, either. “There’s about a 1% loss in
the mellowing process,” he said.
They do
things a little bit differently at Dickel. There’s a blanket
on the top as well as the bottom, and instead of the two
crossed trickle pipes used at Jack Daniel, the whisky pours
onto a perforated steel plate and into the vat. They also
put a lot more whisky in there. “The charcoal bed is
drowned,” Backus said. The bottom of the vat is closed off,
and whisky fills the vat ’til it is brim-full, then the
bottom is opened.
“The whisky
hits every spot of the bed,” Backus explained. “If it
trickles down, drop by drop, the whisky will make a path
down through the charcoal, and it’s going to miss some parts
of the bed. Those parts will never get used, and the parts
in the path get over-used.” That may explain why Backus only
changes a vat’s bed about once a year. Like Bedford, it’s a
matter of the distiller’s judgment. “Some beds go longer,
some less,” he said. “Most are about a year.”
But the big
difference at Dickel is that they keep the mellowing vats
chilled. “We do cold chill mellowing,” Backus said. “People
noticed that the whisky we made in the winter tasted
better.” That’s a Tennessee winter, of course, so don’t
picture vats of whisky with icicles hanging off them. That’s
what happens in Tennessee. What difference does it make in
Massachusetts, once the whiskey is in the bottle and sitting
on the shelf? I asked Jack Daniel’s publicist (and
raconteur, and corporate memory) Roger Brashears what the
difference was between Tennessee whiskey and bourbon. He was
cautious, because Brown-Forman makes some good bourbon, too,
but he mused a bit. “Tennessee whiskey, with going through
the charcoal . . . ” he said, and paused. “It’s sort of like
beauty, it’s in the tongue of the beholder. It’s clean
tasting, sharp, uncluttered. Bourbon has a cluttered taste
to me. Taking someone else’s tastes, though, that’s like
sending off for a mail-order bride – you don’t really know
what you’ll get. It probably won’t taste like that to
you.”
“In my
terms, it’s just a smoother, more mellow product,” said
David Backus. “The charcoal tends to remove some of the
bite, the harshness that shows up in some bourbons.” Backus
set up a tasting of new make before and after the charcoal
vats, and it was amazing. The stuff just off the column
still was muddled, grainy, almost undecided about what it
was going to be. But after the vats, it was a pure spirit of
corn, sweet and light, just raring to get into those barrels
and get to work.
What does
that charcoal mellowing take out, what does it adsorb? Roger
Brashears always says the Lincoln County Process “smooths
out the hog tracks”. It’s hard to say, really, there are
just so many things in new make. The charred oak barrels
take some things out, double distilling takes more, but the
Process is an extra step.
Ask the two
about the difference between their own whiskeys, and see
what happens. “We make it our way, and they make it theirs,”
Brashears said, diplomatically. “If there wasn’t but one way
to make it, and it all tasted the same, you wouldn’t need
but one company to make it.” Backus notes the extra age on
Dickel whiskey: “Generally our whiskey is aged longer,” he
said. “It’s more mature, more mellow, with more sweetness,
less bite.”
Jack
Daniel’s Old No. 7 Black Label is the best-selling American
whiskey, of course, and no one needs to be told how to sell
it. But what about the other Jack Daniel whiskeys: Old No. 7
Green label, Gentleman Jack and the Jack Daniel Single
Barrel? “Sell it by taste if you can,” said Brashears. “Old
Senator Reger Motlow believed in ‘stomach to stomach
advertising’. If you can get them to taste the whiskey, you
won’t need any advertising.”
Dickel’s
not as familiar to most people. Brand manager Tom
Bonaventura had some advice for hand-selling the brand:
introduce it to people. “There are a couple ways to approach
that,” he said. “One thing we’ve employed is a taste test
against Jack Daniel’s or a Kentucky bourbon. The key is to
sample the product. If you want to focus on hand-selling,
it’s all about sampling. Just getting people to try it works
well, it sells itself.
“Some key
talking points,” he continued. “We continue to hand-craft it
in small batches; there are no computer systems any where in
the distillery. We’ve continued to use double-distilling and
the cold-chill mellowing process. That’s something George
Dickel himself realized, that it works better when it’s done
cold. The true consumer will appreciate those differences.
Those are key things that they take to heart. A lot of these
neat little things we do with the brand can be communicated
to the consumer, and they really taste the
difference.”
Dickel’s
looking forward to a higher profile as Diageo decides where
to take the brand, and maybe some new bottlings. “As we move
forward with re-opening the visitor center,” Bonaventura
said, “we’ll probably look at developing products to meet
consumer tastes, products that meet what consumers have told
us they want. There’s nothing specific underway at this
point in time. We’re doing a lot of consumer research, and
when we identify those needs, we’ll provide products to
fulfill them.”
What’s next
for Jack Daniel’s? “We’ve been ahead of Beam the last five
years,” Brashears said, after noting that the two had
swapped the lead in sales for years. “Now there ain’t no
Johnnie Walker Red made in the US, but they’re out there in
the international market, they’re the biggest. I’d quote
Satchel Paige: they better not be looking back, because
someone’s gaining on them.”
Can Jack
Daniel make enough whiskey to continue to grow? “The water’s
the only limitation on how much we can make,” said
Brashears, referring to the steady flow of water from Cave
Spring, the water source on the distillery grounds, “and we
ain’t even dented it yet. So I think we can probably take
care of it.”
Things are
a little different down in Tennessee than they are in
Kentucky, and most of your customers don’t realize it. A
little bit of education – about the Lincoln County Process
and Tennessee whiskey – could do them, and you, a powerful
world of good.
