Nashville Take Two! Day Three

When we left last time, I promised that today would be a very special day. In my opinion, it was probably one of the coolest parts of our trip this time.

If you remember, we started with a group of eight, but my in-laws had to get back to the real world sooner than us. We had said goodbye to them the night before, so they left early today to head home.

We weren't sure how many things were going to be open given that it was Easter Sunday, so we had talked ahead of time about what the six of us might want to do.

I had done some research a couple of weeks earlier and discovered that the Jack Daniels Distillery was open, so we all decided to take the drive down to Lynchburg, TN and go for a tour.

Road Trip!

The drive down to Lynchburg was beautiful. Part of it was mostly expressway and four-lane divided highway, but once you got past Shelbyville, TN it was just a winding, hilly, two-lane road.

We saw a large variety of wildlife on the hour and a half drive down. We pulled in to Lynchburg and found a parking spot across the street from the place where the tours started.

They state this on the website, but if you are planning to visit the distillery, make sure you wear some good walking shoes. If they are busy the walk from the parking lot to the main building is a bit of a distance. Likewise, the tour itself has a bit of walking and climbing of stairs involved.

The Tour

As I mentioned, I had looked at the information on their website before, so I knew that I wanted to take the "Angel's Share" tour. Because we had a large group of people, it made the most sense for all of us to take the same tour.

We could have taken different ones, but then our group would have been split up with different starting and ending times. We were actually lucky, because we got the last six seats on our given tour.

The tours start at specific times, so make sure you get there early as they tend to fill up fast. We had a bit of time before ours started so we hung out on the porch of the welcome building and waited.

The intro picture at the top is my wife and I sitting on the porch waiting for the tour. They have plenty of wooden rocking chairs and Adirondack chairs sitting around for people to wait in.

The tour begins with them gathering your group and taking some pictures to post on their website and for you to buy later. Then they put you on a bus and take you around the facility to look at the many hilltop barrel houses they have.

Finally, they drop you off at the location where you begin the walking part of the tour. The first stop is the area where they burn the wood to create the charcoal for the filtering process. It is an actual production area, so if you have a tour on the right day and time, you can actually see them burning the wood.

This natural spring is the second location on the tour. They say that this is where all of their water comes from that they use for the distillation process. You can kind of see in the picture that over time the barrier they installed to slow the natural flow has worn away. It was a pretty cool little grotto area.

The tour then continued to the area that was originally Jack Daniels office along with the other founders of the company. This was on the wall in that building and is their motto.

The tour continued from there into other areas of the facility. We were not able to take pictures because they were worried about the alcohol vapors igniting, but part of me wonders if they were just trying to protect trade secrets.

We got to see how they work the mash and distill the alcohol. Then we moved on to the area where they charcoal filter the alcohol before it is put into the barrels.

Eventually, the tour made it's way to the barrel house. We sat in a small area and they had us watch a short video about how the barrels are made.

They don't have the facility to make the barrels on site, so they have that done at another location. It was interesting to see in the video how they handcraft every barrel to very exact specifications. They never re-use a barrel, so after they are finished with it, they sell them off to other distilleries or breweries for use with their own products.

We finally made our way to the tasting room and as I had mentioned before, we had chosen the "Angel's Share" tour. This tour basically gave us some of the better whiskeys and was only a couple dollars more than the standard tour.

The tasting consisted of five different kinds of whiskey and they are only allowed to give you a 1/4 ounce of each kind.

They then go through the process of teaching you how to properly taste the whiskey so you can catch all of the subtle fragrances and flavors. It was really very interesting. You will notice that the five kinds we got to sample are much higher quality than the standard No. 7 you see in the local store:

• Jack Daniel's No. 27 Gold - This is where they started us.

• Jack Daniel's Sinatra Select - From there they moved us on to this one.

• Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Select - This one was my favorite, if you have the money, you can buy a whole barrel for $10,000+USD and you get your name on a wall in their hall of fame.

• Jack Daniel's Single Barrel, Barrel Proof - This one was pretty intense. They bottle it straight from the barrel and the proof can vary from 125 to 140. The stuff we got to try was 128.6 proof, yeow!

• Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Rye - This was the final whiskey we got to taste. I am not a big fan of rye's, but this one was actually really good.

The tour ended after the tasting back at the welcome building. They have a small shop inside of the welcome center where you can buy bottles of all the spirits they make. The bottles of the kinds we had tried were too pricey for me though, so we just headed back to Nashville.

We noticed this pull-off on our way into town, so on our way out, we stopped and took some pictures. By now, it was mid-afternoon, so the six of us were starting to get hungry.

We stopped in Shelbyville, TN for a late lunch at a nice little Mexican restaurant called La Hacienda. Based on their website, it looks like they have several locations in the area.

The house salsa was very good that came with the chips. They also had a buffet that most all of us took advantage of. I would definitely stop there again if I ever found myself heading back through Shelbyville.

We made it back to our hotels and just took some time to relax. Eventually, we all got hungry again, so we went down to the hotel bar and met up with our friends.

We ordered some food and had some drinks while listening to the musician that was playing that night and watching the NCAA Women's basketball finals. We made plans to meet for lunch the next day and then headed to bed.

If you ever find yourself in Nashville and want to take a day trip, I highly recommend heading to Lynchburg and touring the distillery.

Tune in next time for our final day in Nashville! It was a great day full of more great food and more new places.

You can view all the posts in this series here:

Nashville Take Two! Day 1

Nashville Take Two! Day 2

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Many of my posts in this series have been featured in The STEEMEngine and SteemRepair, check them out: