Guys, what they're doing here only happens one to two days out of the week.

Very rarely does a person actually get to see this happen.

You're listening to a tour of the Jack Daniels Distillery in

Lynchburg, Tennessee. This tape was shared with us by the podcast brought to you

by. Under this huge metal hood there's a giant pile of sugar maple wood and

it's on fire.

It's going to burn for an hour and a half.

It's going to reach temperatures close to 1800 degrees and when it's done

it's natural lump charcoal.

That charcoal will be ground up into piece-sized pieces,

then used in a process called charcoal mellow it.

What we're going to do is drip your whiskey through the charcoal and this is what makes us a Tennessee

whiskey. This is going to make your whiskey extremely smooth and this is what separates us from a bourbon.

In other words, charcoal mellowing. This is what separates is from a bourbon.

In other words, charcoal mellowing is what makes Tennessee whiskey, Tennessee

whiskey.

Jack Daniels has been doing it this way for over 150 years,

since way back in the 1860s when the real Jack Daniel made it himself.

And y'all are only listening to me because I have a can of whiskey sitting right there.

Whiskey making in the U.S. has long been thought of as a Scotch-Irish tradition. Jack Daniel was the most famous example of a Tennessee whiskey maker with Scotch-Irish roots.

But in 2016, the New York Times published a front-page story with the headline,

Jack Daniel's Embrace A Hidden ingredient, Help from a Slave. It said that Jack-Dowell Jack Daniels' embraces a hidden ingredient.

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