Barrel & Maturation

A barrel may only hold whiskey once in Tennessee. Just like bourbon, the law requires new barrels made of American white oak, freshly charred on the inside, never used before. Jack Daniel's builds these barrels in its own cooperage on-site. The staves are toasted and then charred so heavily that the inner wall splits like burnt skin.

Because each barrel is used only once, its story doesn't end after maturation. Many American whiskey barrels travel on afterward, often to Scotland or the Caribbean. There, Scotch and rum get a second life inside them.

Maturation takes place in multi-story warehouses made of wood and tin, standing on the hills around Lynchburg in Moore County. Barrelhouse 1 through 14, for example, was built in 1938, three stories tall, with racks from floor to ceiling packed with barrels. The barrelhouses on Coy Hill sit at the highest point on the property. There, the temperature swings between day and night more sharply than at any other site.

A fixed age statement on the label is more the exception than the rule in Tennessee. Instead, experienced tasters walk through the warehouses and sample straight from the barrel, one at a time. They decide: this one's ready, that one needs another year.

That's how two barrels from the same vintage can end up tasting different. It comes down to whether they sat up top under the tin roof or down in a cooler corner. Some of these individual barrels become their own single-barrel bottling, with the location on the label instead of a year.