The travel plans for today are to get to the town of McMinnville some 80 miles south of Nashville.
To break the journey up we decide, or at least I decide, to stop at the town of Lynchburg. Apart from being a quaint little town, Lynchburg is famous as the home of the Jack Daniels the famous Tennessee whiskey house. Fortunately we arrive just in time for the last tour of the day. We have done a few factory tours on this trip, primarily as educational visits for Jack and Emily, but also because they were child friendly, such as the Cape Cod chip factory and Ben & Jerry’s Ice cream plant. This is definitely one for the adults. The other tours we have had were also a little disappointing in the sense that they were short and quite sterile as you mainly got to see things from behind big glass windows. Not this tour. Firstly they take you to the yard where they burn the wood to make the charcoal – which is what they pass the whiskey through to add body. Then you go into the cave where the water flows from inside the limestone hills of Tennessee, and then to the old building that was Jack Daniel’s office. In this office sit the safe that killed Jack – he kicked in rage one day, breaking his toe which led to septicaemia – resulting in losing his leg and finally death a few years later. After this you are taken into the main part of the distillery where you get to see the mash inside huge vats (which does not smell or look good). The next part of the tour, which was mine and Karen’s favourite, was going into the area where they pass the 140 percent alcohol across the charcoal before putting it in the barrels for storage. This is done to provide the whiskey’s flavour but it still smells pretty good even at this stage of its maturity. Finally we are taken through one of the storage buildings full of barrels of maturing Jack Daniels whiskey. Amusingly Morre County in which Lynchburg is situated is a dry county, so you cannot find any bars or retailers that sell alcohol (sounds not a place I’d like to live) and yet you find a whiskey distillery here. In fact Jack Daniels had 75 storage houses, each with about 20,000 barrels in them, within the Lynchburg area. This equates to 360 million bottles stored in what is a dry county. Having to be satisfied with just smelling the fumes we quite happily (at least the grown-ups do) set off for McMinnville our resting place for the next couple of days.
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