Day 16 - Jack Daniel's Distillery and Beyond!!

We got another sleep in again this morning, but everyone was up fairly early as we were all quite excited! We were going to the Jack Daniel's Distillery in Lynchburg! We managed to get there before the opening time and get on the first tour of the day... Our tour guides name was Jesse James (same as the infamous thief and Sandra Bullock's ex husband...) But it wasn't either of those two haha! He was actually one of the master testers (what a job!). He took us through to a movie room to start us of with a bit of history behind the company before leading us onto the natural spring where they collect the water that the use in the process of making Jack's.

They then took us on a tour of the rest of the distillery, but we weren't allowed to take any photos because we might give away their secrets and how they make their wonderful drink! We went on up to the fermenting room which held millions of gallons of Jack Daniel's and that was only one warehouse... They had 80 more exactly the same!! There was a small gap in one of the fermenting vats that allowed us to take a quick whiff... If you ever have a blocked nose and want to get rid of it, this is the place to be! It literally burnt the back of my throat it was that bad! The head jerk reaction that everyone experienced whilst smelling was classic! No one was expecting it at all as Jesse didn't clue us in at all! We then moved on to the next room while everyone was having a good laugh about what had just happened...

The next room was the filtering room where they allowed the fermented alcohol to filter through maple charcoal to give it a little bit of flavour and rid it of all the impurities. This room smelt 100 times better haha! We then moved onto the bottling room and the storage barrel rooms. We were allowed to take a few photos in here as it was closed for the day due to some malfunctions. This was great because they had actually bottled and entire barrel of Jack Daniel's and stacked it up on a feature podium. For one single barrel, it made 240 bottles of Jack Daniel's! I think both Craig and I had at this point started to consider buying a barrel... We ended up settling for a holiday special edition they had for sale in the shop (Only 55,000 bottles were made and it can only be bought in the U.S.) and we got some engraving done on the bottles. Our last stop before we left the distillery was a special room known as the Squires Room. The only reason we had access to this was because Craig is a Jack Daniel's Squire, the room was pretty cool, it had a very "secret society" feel to it haha!

Against our will, it was time to leave as we needed to press forward in hopes to make it past St.Louis again by that night. We stopped off for a quick bite in town for lunch and hit the road. We ended up stopping at a caravan park just outside of St.Louis that night, which just so happened to be down the road from a White Castle food joint... For those who don't know what a White Castle is, I suggest you stop reading right now and go and watch the movie "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle"...

It was the most vile food I have ever tasted haha! I thought McDonald's was bad! I now know why the people who eat here are always high... You have to high to eat that junk haha!! We left in a fit of laughter about how bad it was and went to sleep.

Next stop... The road to Oklahoma City!

Mark