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Day 5 (Jack Daniels Brewery)

The distillery is located in a dry county. They have special permission to sell a limited edition bottles signed by the master distiller. He had been in an hour before we arrived at the sales area. I believe the price was $34.50 per bottle. So...we didn't get one :)

Here is the main entrance to the brewery.

Here is the main entrance from the side, and on top of the mountain you can see two of their barrel houses that they use to age the Whiskey in. They are all around the area. Seems like one of these could hold a million barrels.

Our tour group got to pose for a shot before the tour started. Then the photo was posted on the web for 3 months. We are the ones under the arrow.

This is Marlene our tour guide. She was pretty cool :)

This is the spring that all the water comes from that the Whiskey is made from. It was nice and cool in from of it too.

This was the first real thing we got to see once the tour really started. Here they are making the charcoal for the Whiskey to drain through. They say it gives it the smooth mellow flavor. They only used certain wood from a certain place, but I don't remember what it was or where it came from.

This plaque was on the building right in front of the spring. It used to be Jack's office.

This is a life size statue of Jack. Well, they said he is a couple of inches tall for some reason. He should be the same height as Pat. Behind them, you can see the spring.

For those who don't know how Jack died, here's the story. One day Jack was trying to get into the safe, and could not get the combination to work. He finally got pissed at the safe, and kicked it. After a few days, gangrene set in his little toe. He then died from it. This is the killer safe he kicked.

This building is the stillhouse where the huge stills are (duh).

Here's a close up of the door.

Here comes the Brewskies.

These are the Fermenters

Spin 180&Mac251; and these Fermenters are on the other side of the room.

They opened up the Fermenters so we could see in. You could see the grain bubbling as it ferments.

We left the Fermenters and as we did, she pointed out the mold on all the trees and buildings. You can see the black mold on this one and on the grass. It is naturally occurring in areas around distilleries. Don't remember why, but I guess it is common.

This is the entrance to the Mellowing house. I'm not sure why it needs to mellow, but I guess it does :)

Here it is getting mellowed. It is trickling down through the charcoal that was being made at the start of our tour.

Here is a shot of some of the mellowers. They said we could not taste the whiskey, but they said we could smell it from these mellowers. They said this was as close as you could get to tasting it. They said to get someone fan the lid up and down, and then get down by the lid and take a deep breath. The smell was so strong you literally could taste it. I couldn't believe how strong the smell was.

They have a special room with dedicated to purchasing a barrel of. There is a wall that is covered with small plaques of people that have purchased a barrel of whiskey. For some reason I did not take a photo of the wall. This is the bottling area for the Whiskey that is sold as a barrel only.

This is one of the barrel houses where they store the Whiskey to age. This is the smallest barrel house they have and it was huge but it only held 300,000 barrels. The others up on the mountains store 1,000,000 barrels. In the photo to the left (same photo from the top of the page) you can see one of the large barrel houses on the top of a hill. They are all on the top of hills so the wind can blow through them. To the bottom right you can see the entrance to the distillery.

I did the best I could to get shots of the barrels in here, but it is dark. The Barrel House was pretty much the end of our tour.

These next couple of shots were in the Visitors Center. They gave a little history of Jack and the area.

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