Region & History

In Lynchburg, a town of barely seven hundred people in southern Tennessee, one of America's most famous distilleries has stood since 1875. Jack Daniel officially registered his business that year, after his mentor Dan Call gave it up for religious reasons. To this day, the distillery sits in Moore County, one of the counties where the sale of alcohol is prohibited by law.

It wasn't Call who taught him the craft, but a man few people knew about for a long time: Nathan "Nearest" Green. Green was first enslaved and later worked as a free distiller for Call, where he showed the seven-year-old Jack Daniel how to filter through charcoal. After the Civil War, Daniel brought him on as the first master distiller at his own distillery. Several of Green's sons worked there too. The Brown-Forman company only officially recognized this in 2017, with a plaque in the visitor center.

The name Lincoln County Process seems like a mistake today. The distillery was originally located in Lincoln County, but in 1871 a new county line shifted the site into Moore County. Ironically, Benjamin Prichard's distillery, the only one still located in present-day Lincoln County, is the sole producer that skips this process entirely. The 2013 law explicitly names it as the exception.

Not far from Lynchburg, in Tullahoma, lies Cascade Hollow, home of George Dickel. The distillery ran into trouble in the nineties when overly ambitious production plans threw inventory levels out of balance. In 1999, owner Diageo shut the operation down entirely. The stills didn't start running again until 2003.

In 2013, the state put this practice into law for the first time. Anyone calling their product Tennessee Whiskey must produce it in Tennessee, distill it from at least 51 percent corn, and filter it through maple charcoal before barreling. New names have sprung up in Nashville alongside the old ones ever since. Nelson's Green Brier has been back in the Nelson family's own hands since 2014, and Corsair skips bourbon altogether, distilling American single malt instead.