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LYNCHBURG, Tenn. – A common adage goes, “all bourbon is whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.”
And, without trying to start an argument here, it’s also true – though more controversial for some reason – that Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey is bourbon, despite the fact that it isn’t labeled as such.
In fact, the sole federal definition of Tennessee Whiskey, written into NAFTA, is that it is straight bourbon produced in the state. But, not all bourbon made in Tennessee is Tennessee Whiskey, according to a 2013 state law.
With a single exception for Prichard's Distillery – which earned a grandfathered exception (ironic since it is one of only two distilleries actually located in Lincoln County) – anything called Tennessee Whiskey must undergo the so-called Lincoln County Process, which is the filtering or steeping of whiskey in maple charcoal.
In the past, some believed the process was invented by a white distiller, Alfred Eaton – or adapted by him from a South Carolina distiller who arrived in Lynchburg – in 1825.
The process – which used to be called “charcoal leaching” – was said to have been a specialty of famed African-American distiller Nearest Green, who worked for Jack Daniel.
Nowadays more accepted wisdom is that the process – which dates, in some form, back to ancient Egypt – was handed down to Green by enslaved distillers.
According to the website of the Uncle Nearest distillery, “it is believed by many whiskey and food historians to have been brought in by slaves, who were already using charcoal to filter their water and purify their foods in West Africa.”
The process does not add anything to the un-aged whiskey, but it does, via adsorption – or the attraction of dissolved chemicals – smooth the flavor of the spirit by removing unpleasant fusel oils, including amyl, isobutyl and other alcohols, and sulfuric compounds like dimethyl trisulfide.
The Tennessee State rules are not terribly specific, so as you can imagine, there is variation in the approaches adopted by distillers.
As I noted in this story, the chunks of sugar maple charcoal through which Nelson's Green Brier whiskey is filtered are much larger than what you’ll find at Dickel Distillery, where the charcoal is about the size of a nickel. At Jack Daniel’s the pieces are roughly dime-sized.
Not even the amount of charcoal is prescribed.
“I’ll tell you this,” says Jack Daniel’s Barrel Maturation Manager and Master Taster Byron Copeland, “if you had a tub and it was filled with whiskey and you threw in one piece of charcoal, you could still call it Tennessee Whiskey.”
But at Jack Daniel’s here in Lynchburg, Tennessee (which is in Moore County today but was in Lincoln County until 1873), the Lincoln County Process is taken very seriously, and they are definitely not throwing in one piece of charcoal.
This I learned for myself when Jack Daniel’s lured me back down to Lynchburg with the promise of fire.
Passing the tour entrance, bottle shop and tasting rooms, Copeland and I make our way up a rising road that snakes past a small bottling facility, the old company office where namesake Jack Daniel infamously and fatally stubbed his toe on a metal safe, the still house and other buildings – and a pair of old distillery fire brigade trucks – before reaching the charcoal production.
There, we find four stacks of wood slats – each stack is called a rick – sitting in an open-sided kiln with a chimney sprouting from the roof. There’s also a second kiln that isn’t used quite as often.
They’re both covered in a spray-on heat-resistant plaster as a refractor that’s rated to withstand 3,000 degrees. The plaster is re-applied every other year or so.
Awaiting our arrival are Darren Lipham and Tracy Matlock, the men whose job it is to transform the sugar maple ricks into the charcoal that then transforms the bourbon into Tennessee Whiskey.
The wood, Lipham tells me, comes from manufacturers – furniture makers, etc. – within about a 90-mile radius of the distillery.
It is scrap wood, off-cuts that arrive in a standard form, pre-stacked in roughly 6-foot-tall ricks, though, Lipham adds, that wasn’t always the case. There is old film footage of distillery workers stacking the wood into ricks themselves.
“They used to stack it right there in that shed,” Lipham says, pointing to a nearby building. He adds that the charcoal production area sits on the site of an old sawmill.
The sawmill isn’t on the 1894 Sanborn map for the site, so it must have come before or after that time.
The map, however, does show a cooperage elsewhere on the property, and on roughly the site of the current charcoal production area, a spot marked “scattered piles of cord wood.” That timber was used to make barrels, produce charcoal and stoke the furnaces that heated the stills.
"The sawmill was used to cut hard white sugar maple logs into ricks for the production of the charcoal used in our vats," says Jack Daniel's official historian Nelson Eddy, who suggests that the mill came later than the 1894 map. "The logs would be delivered to the distillery from the surrounding area.
"Today, the ricks are delivered precut to the distillery eliminating the need for a sawmill. The old building where Darren Lipham and Tracy Matlock sit to watch the ricks burn is the new sawmill building that replaced the old sawmill in the early 1960s."
When we arrive at the site, Lipham is holding a blue tank with a length of black rubber hose connecting a long, slim brass sprayer that has a slight bend near the top and a spray lever near the bottom. The tank is filled with 140-proof new make, straight off the four stills in the nearby still house.
Reaching into a gap between the ricks, Lipham begins spraying a nascent flame near the top of the stack before handing the hose to me and instructs me to keep spraying in one spot.
“If you move it around,” he advises, “it’ll never catch.”
While I do this, the flames slowly, but palpably begin to spread. Occasionally, Lipham pumps the tank to help push the new make up in the tank while I spray. At the same time, Copeland quizzes me, as I quickly learn he is apt to do.
“Why do we use new make to burn the ricks and not something else,” he asks, and I’m thankful I know the right answer.
Because gasoline or some other accelerant could impart their odors into the charcoal, thus affecting the whiskey that seeps through it later.
Lipham then explains that sugar maple is used for the same reason.
“The key is it don't have a taste or smell to it once it's in charcoal form, it don't change the taste of the whiskey. It just takes out the oils. (If it was, say, oak), it might have a little bit of oak smell to it.
Once the flames have established themselves, I stop spraying and Lipham tells me about his inauspicious hiring for this position.
While Matlock has family that worked at the distillery before him – as is not only not uncommon, but in fact, extremely common at Jack – Lipham does not.
(Until recently, when Matlock "retired" from it, both were members of the Jack Daniel's professionally trained and certified fire brigade. The brigade's 39 members are all full-time distillery employees who drop everything to respond to calls. Lipham is still a member of this team.)
“I came down here just as a temporary, I didn't know anybody and worked for a year and a half. and then got on full-time,” Lipham remembers. “I done a little bit of everything. I rolled barrels and put 'em in the warehouses, I worked at maintenance for a little bit and I worked in processing, cutting a whiskey down there at Single Barrel (bottling).”
When a guy who had been making charcoal was let go, Lipham was hired and had his, well, baptism by fire.
“They fired that guy and ended up hiring me and they just said, ‘figure it out’,” he recalls with a laugh. “They said figure out what works best and have fun at your job.”
Through what he calls, “lots of trial and error,” Lipham not only figured it out, he created some efficiencies, too,
“We changed it a lot, man,” he says. “We're doing a lot better now. Used to be it would take 22 ricks to fill a vat. Now it's down to 16. A lot more yield.
“We figured out the hotter and faster it burns the more charcoal it makes, so we just let it set it on fire and let it go. Used to be they would have us out here spraying it with water and stuff and try to keep it at 1200 degrees or something, and we were slowing it down. It was burning longer and burning all the charcoal, burning all the wood, turning it to ash.
“And we’re seasoning it. When I got here, they were burning it right off the truck, not letting it sit, and now we’re letting it sit for like six months for seasoning.”
They keep about 1,200 ricks in the yard near the kiln, and there is more in storage nearby.
At four ricks per burn, it takes four burns to make enough charcoal for one vat. Lipham and Matlock generally do at least four burns per week to make sure there’s enough charcoal on hand.
The wood burns for about 90 minutes and when the four ricks are fully engulfed in flame, the heat is incredibly intense. It’s a cold morning for Tennessee when I visited, with temperatures in the 20s. In summer, Lipham says, temperatures right at the burn can reach 2,000 degrees.
But, amazingly, there’s almost no smoke whatsoever.
That’s not a surprise to Lipham and Matlock.
The chimney not only has a fan in it, it also has an afterburner system that consumes the smoke.
“It pulls (air, like a flue), but it's also got natural gas going to it when we turn it on and it burns the smoke off,” says Lipham, noting that the kilns were installed in 1976.
“Jack Daniel’s done it kind of like a green thing back then and then the EPA made them put the afterburner on it.
"But when (the wood) is seasoned like this and you start it at the top, like you just started it, as it burns it burns the smoke off, so there’s not a lot of smoke on it anyway.”
As the flames begin to subside and the ricks have turned into a glowing pile of collapsed carbon nuggets, Lipham and Matlock take some long grabbers and begin to pull off pieces that haven’t burned down enough.
They toss them off to the side and will include them in the next burn, sort of like a flaming version of sour mash distilling.
When there’s one corner of the burn that seems to be slowing things down, Matlock hops into a front loader and uses the bucket to pull that section down to get it to burn better.
After another plucking of the oversized bits, Matlock is back in the front loader to spread the pile out more thoroughly.
Then, he and Lipham each grab a hose and from opposite sides of the pile begin to hose it down. Now, the air fills with smoke and steam as the water hits the glowing embers.
Once the pile cools completely, it will be brought into an adjacent building where a grinder is used to break the coals down to the proper size, about a quarter of an inch. Then it will be stored in an elevated tank or hoppers until it is needed.
Inside this small building, the walls are covered in signatures – written in charcoal, of course – of visitors of all kinds, including celebrities like Kanye West and Shaboozey.
When members of the Milwaukee Bucks organization visited to work on a collab, one of them scrawled “Bucks in 6!” in there.
At that point, they’ll fire up a tractor that has exceptionally wide axles to bring the charcoal into the mellowing building to fill the vats.
When you enter the mellowing building, you use an entrance that accesses the upper level of the place, which is built into a hillside.
Here, you can see the tops of some of the 72 10-foot deep vats full of charcoal, each of which has a capacity of 2,326.63 gallons.
You can also spy the rails upon which the wide-axle tractor rides when it is bringing in new charcoal through a few garage doors.
“Back in the day,” Copeland says, “you used to have to do it by hand. There's actually a video. You can see people in there scooping (charcoal) and bringing out burlap sacks.”
The new-make spirit is piped into the vats where it drips – at a rate regulated by a flow sensor – out of a series of holes in metal pipes positioned a few inches above the top of the charcoal. Copeland says the drips should fall into a vat at roughly a gallon a minute, but adds the exact drip rate is not an “exact science.”
It will take about 24 hours – though it could take longer, too – for a drop to reach the bottom of the tank.
Much like the effect of the aging whiskey being absorbed into the staves charred barrel and then pushed back out by expansion and contraction, while the juice is slowly leeching through the vat, it’s getting inside the nooks and crannies of the charcoal, letting the carbonized sugar maple do its work to pull out the unwanted chemicals.
When it reaches the bottom, the new-make is collected in a basin and sent to a receiving tank.
Like most everything in the state law defining Tennessee Whiskey, there is nothing about how the whiskey must make contact with the charcoal. While some places drip the whiskey through the charcoal, others push it through more forcefully.
At Dickel, in nearby Tullahoma, for example, the whisky (no “e” for Dickel!) is steeped in vats that are 13 feet deep. At Nelson’s a showerhead “rains” the whiskey down into a three-foot-deep vat that is two feet wide.
Some distillers use a pump to push the whiskey through the charcoal.
It should be noted that Jack’s actually does push, too. But only in one case.
Gentleman Jack is made via the same process as its Old No. 7.
“Then after we barrel it, it matures in the warehouse for four or five years,” says Copeland. “Then it goes through another three feet (of charcoal) after it's dumped. It's pushed through, it is not drip, drip, drip. There’s pressure behind it and it’s literally just this little container of three feet of charcoal.”
That second phase, which smoothes the whiskey – removing a bit of bite – but allows it to maintain more of its color than if it dripped slowly through another 10 feet of coals, is not done at the main distillery but at a facility down the road, where the bulk of the bottling takes place.
I ask Copeland if Jack has ever tinkered with the details of the Lincoln County Process – size of the charcoal, size of the vats, etc.
“I'm pretty sure from a (research and development) perspective, yeah,” he says. “I'm gonna tell you something because I'm on the innovation team, too, and nothing coming out of Jack is just done (without R&D).
“We just can't because of our brand. You've got to think about trying to protect this brand. So that three feet (for Gentleman Jack), I'm pretty sure that yeah, it had gone through multiple R&D (trials). ‘Oh yeah, let’s try ...’ (Otherwise) it would've never made it out here.”
Generally, the charcoal in the vats needs to be switched out every 10-12 months, though sometimes it happens more frequently. Details on when each vat was changed is tracked via software and by Lipham and Matlock.
“It doesn't happen all at once,” Copeland says, adding that every week one vat or another is likely having its charcoal replaced. “So we know what date we filled (each vat), and we know it's getting time to refill.
“So this room is probably on the same schedule, because you don't want to jump from room to room, right?”
But if you’ve learned anything about whiskey it’s that many of the steps are natural processes, based on inputs that are rarely 100 percent identical, and charcoal is no exception.
As the charcoal in the vat touches more and more new-make over the course of a year or so, flavors and aromas of the juice change, too.
Thus, there are times when a vat doesn’t make it a full 10-12 months.
“I go in that room and I do sensory on these vats and I'm like, ‘something's not right with this vat’ or the character is not there or what have you,” Copeland says. “So, then vat, say number 64, needs to be changed now.”
There are many indicators of when it’s time to change the charcoal, including a variety of aromas and flavors.
“Matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago I went over and I was doing the sensory on the vats and I was like, ‘hmm, this one’s done. Something's awful with this and the quality manager was like, ‘yeah, we just changed that one out.’ So it was brand new. But I knew something was different with it.”
A large vacuum is used to empty the spent coals from the vats.
One thing I’ve learned from my visits to Lynchburg is that Jack wastes nothing. The spent grain, the heads and tails, everything finds a new life, and that is also true for the spent charcoal.
Some of it is bagged up and sold in the gift shop for visitors to take home to use in their smokers and grills, and some of it is sold in sacks to help clean up oil spills, Copeland says, but the bulk of it is sent to a manufacturer who makes it into charcoal briquettes for retail sale.
When the charcoal is changed, the vats are cleaned.
“We'll rinse these out with water to get all the whiskey out,” Copeland explains. “It’ll go to the heads and tails tanks and then it goes back through distillation again.”
The distillation process will remove the water and, voila, 140 proof new-make again.
After it's cut to 125 proof, the charcoal-mellowed new-make moves from the receiving tank to new charred oak barrels for aging in the warehouse, where it will sit for at least four years before being cut to 80 proof and bottled as Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey.
Other Jack expressions follow different paths. For example, Heritage Series whiskeys were barreled at 100 proof, which Copeland says can give those a softness and creaminess.
Lately, Jack Daniel’s has been releasing age-stated whiskeys, too, aged 10, 12 and soon, 14 years.
A visit to one of the barrelhouses shows there are more than a few casks that are 6, 7, 8 years old and even older.
On the top floor we find a barrel dated September 2017 and handing me a small bottle, Copeland begins to bore an air hole near the top of the barrel head and then a hole lower down. As the rich, brown liquid squirts from the opening, I capture it in the bottle and give it a taste as Copeland fills the holes with cedar plugs.
We don’t know the proof because it’s literally straight out of the barrel that’s been sitting for more than seven years, but it's complex and rich in vanilla and oak, with a balance of sweetness and spice.
The grain did its part in creating this gorgeous flavor profile, as did the yeast and the barrel. But, playing no small part, was that charcoal and the work that Lipham and Matlock do over in the rick yard.
It’s why the charcoal mellowing is done the way it’s done, the way it’s always been done here.
“We go through this process,” Copeland says, “because it's the process that we've been doing for over 150 years.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
