Chasing Whiskey

There's a nice pace to this.

Nobody in the whiskey game can be in a hurry.

Otherwise you'll be awfully frustrated.

I've worked on some great global brands over my career,

but I've never struck a brand

that has the connection that Jack Daniel's

has around the world.

I've never found a brand anything like it.

You know, our challenge is to keep the brand special.

Hey Phil. - How are you?

Good. Good to see you.

A lot of the board members,

they're not familiar with brands that have grown

for six and seven generations of humanity.

And so here's this thing called Jack Daniel's,

which the reason it can do that is because it's iconic.

It's been adopted by culture and not just American culture.

It's been adopted by around the world,

that sort of quest for authenticity or realness.

Jack Daniel's just happens to sort of capture that.

How many of these are we good

with where we're having to recreate the image?

The story is still real.

We want the best image we can to interact with the copy.

Kind of real, definitely real, definitely real.

Definitely, I'm talking imagery, not story.

- So long as we as the brand stewards stay tight

to what we can do, what we're allowed to do,

some advertise, some types of advertising

and some types of product development,

the cultural industries will look

after that brand it seems to be.

Jack's sort of like American whiskey for the world

and now it's as big as it is and with that sort

of scale comes those challenges of how do you keep it

as authentic as Lynchburg really is?

I think if told, you know, in a way that's unencumbered

by us the brand owner, whatever it is

that has made it the world's most popular whiskey,

you know if we could capture that

that must be an interesting story.

- The smell of the whiskey in the air,

the smell of the maple wood burning,

it's a special place.

- You couldn't hardly talk

about Jack Daniel without talking about Lynchburg.

- You say Tennessee they'll say three people: Elvis,

Dolly and Jack.

- Lynchburg is really a beautiful place.

I know it's small and it's a little country town,

but the story is big.

There's a lot of things we're still learning.

- Planet earth it's large in scale.

It's huge.

Lynchburg would be lucky to be even a pin dot on it.

But the one thing that people anywhere

in the world will know is when you say Jack Daniel's.

Welcome to Jack Daniel's.

Welcome to Lynchburg.

They know that's good whiskey.

- It's amazing that the product has got that big.

Everybody knows about Jack worldwide.

America.

- You look at generations of where they came from

and how hard working they are,

that means more to me than anything.

- How would you describe

what a movie about Jack Daniel's would be like?

What genre would that be?

- It should be a family movie, really.

I'm from here.

Being from a small town, Lynchburg is peaceful.

It's quiet.

Yeah, we ride and work together every morning.

My mother and her sister,

they rode together and lived next door to each other.

They rode to work, went to grocery, went

And now we're doing it.

Most people when they start here they stay here.

Family first.

- It's always been about family, you know.

It's not unusual to have father

and sons working side by side.

Generations of families that have worked here.

We make every drop here.

We're not near the interstate.

You're on a two-lane highway

so it takes some logistics to ship 160 countries

from a small town like we are.

- Do you get that question a lot?

Is it really made all here?

Yeah they do.

They kind of question from the beginning to the end process.

Of course my part is the export shipping overseas.

UK, France and Germany are typically

our bigger bulk shipments.

Are there places

that you've gotten orders that you're jealous

like, "Oh man, I really want to go there."?

Yeah.

Australia orders a lot of Jack Daniel's.

I think that's a neat place I'd like to visit some day.

- Occasionally I'll get somebody who is like

they can't believe that we don't have a plant close

to them because they'll see Jack Daniel's

all around and they're like, "Really?

Every bottle is leaving Lynchburg and coming here?"

I'm like, "Yeah."

- It doesn't really matter where you find it,

it should be the same.

The hands that are crafting it

are the same no matter whether it's Nashville

or South Africa or Australia.

- This type of cave that we're looking at

is a limestone cave spring.

You've got to have iron free water to make good whiskey.

Jack ran away from home when he was about 10 years old

and he went and lived with his neighbor

who was a Lutheran minister and that man's name

was Dan Call.

He had an enslaved man that worked on the farm

with him named Nearest Green.

Jack took interest in making whiskey with the preacher

and Nearest Green when he was about 12 years old.

He started making whiskey with them

but the church people didn't like the idea

of Dan Call preaching to them and making whiskey,

so they asked him to sell his still.

So he ended up selling it to Jack Daniel for $25.

He gets the still registered in 1866

and Jack Daniel would eventually bring that still

to this area.

And we still make all the whiskey right here

in this hillside today.

Now what you smell in the air,

that's sour mash.

That's made out of corn, barley, malt and rye.

We're going to grind it up.

You can cook it with the water coming out of this cave.

- The process is definitely designed

to be consistent over time.

There's so much technology out there

and we certainly are not bashful

about using it where it's helpful,

but more importantly there's nothing that tells you

what something tastes like or what something smells like.

A lot of the newer brands coming

into our industry they get a lot of props

for being very crafty and clever and stuff like that.

A lot of just buying a freeze-dried yeast

that's commercially available.

If you're using a commercially available

freeze-dried yeast culture, there's a good chance

that your product is going to taste very similar

to everybody else that is using that same yeast.

So we have a very pure culture for Jack Daniel's

and it's cryogenically preserved here

and also two other locations.

So that's I call that the "coke" formula

or the "coke" secret and that's the thing that we need

to protect mostly to make sure

that Jack Daniel's character doesn't change over time.

- Where is your secret cryogenic freezer?

It's out back here.

If you look down in here,

There's the original jug yeast culture

that has the full diversity.

Of all the different things

that have been the Jack Daniel's yeast culture

over the years that would date back

all the way to prohibition but it comes

from that mother culture that's been here for forever.

And this was one of the things

that really I think is a strength for Jack Daniel's

is we don't change much over time.

We haven't changed over the years very much

and that's not by accident.

We've been very deliberate about trying to be consistent

in character. Making every drop here

is important because people will say, "How do you know

that Jack Daniel's today taste

like what it did 10 years ago and how do you like 10 years

from now that it's going to taste

like what it tastes like today?"

And there's a handful of reasons,

the way we handle the yeast culture,

the way we check it and test for it.

But the process, the process is designed

and not allowed to drift.

- One, two, one, two, three, four.