For those lucky enough to visit the Jack Daniel Distillery, taking the time for a Distillery Tour is a must. Although official tours weren’t offered until 1964, it wasn’t necessarily hard to get one before that time. For those visitors who made their way to Lynchburg back then, all they usually had to do was ask and chances are someone would show them around the Distillery grounds. Times have certainly changed, however, as Jack Daniel’s employed 22 Distillery Guides as of 2020.
Some of the current highlights visitors will see while on tour include visiting a barrelhouse which holds more than 20,000 barrels of whiskey, seeing the rickyard where hard sugar maple wood is burned to make the charcoal used for mellowing, going into the underground cave spring where all of the iron-free water is drawn, learning about the whiskey making process while seeing the stills, the fermenting tanks, and the charcoal mellowing vats, viewing Jack Daniel’s first office, and getting a look at the reconstruction of the White Rabbit Saloon as it appeared in Lynchburg in the early 1900’s. In recent years the Distillery has also been able to offer samples of their whiskey, but it hasn’t always been this way.
Additional information about the Distillery Tours is provided in Volume II of the Jack Daniel’s Bottle Collector’s Guide.
