Some Tennessee Whisky Tours

We started off our final day in Tennessee with a nourishing lunch. We had less interesting real lunch afterward.

The Goo Goo Cluster is from Nashville, TN, which meant we weren't cool until we tried one. The candy lump thing was the first candy bar to have multiple ingredients besides just chocolate. According to an NPR story about the amorphous treat it was a sponsor of the Grand Ole Opry (which we visited two days prior) for forty years and the "gooey sweet was advertised so heavily on air through those decades that many people believed "Goo" was an acronym for Grand Ole Opry."

Our destination today was Lynchburg, TN, home of the Jack Daniel's distillery.

Had a quick lunch on the tiny little town's square. We hadn't had enough trains after yesterday so we chose The Bar-B-Que Caboose Cafe.

Lynchburg, home of one of whisky's biggest names, is located in a dry county. Dumb. So, so dumb.

The visitor center had lots of interesting artifacts on display.

A big moment for Jack Daniels was winning the gold medal at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.

I'm a bourbon person, and have been since we did the Kentucky Bourbon Trail (here and here). "Tennessee whisky is just bourbon with one additional step: charcoal filtering. I wasn't super impressed. The bourbon experience is just better than Tennessee whisky in every way I can think of. Kentucky was a whole state full of distilleries; Tennessee has two. Kentucky was throwing free bourbon tastings and bourbon balls at us like they were going out of style; Tennessee was stingy and in a stupid dry county. So stupid. So dry and stupid.

Jack Daniels the man was about the only part of this place that was very interesting to me.

We were taken to the cave-like place where the magically clean whisky water emanated from.

Our tour guide brought us to the company's old office building. According to the story, Jack Daniels came in early to work one day and couldn't get this safe open. Frustrated., he kicked the safe, broke his foot, and later died from complications from the injury. The moral of the story being: don't come to work early. Unfortunately according to Wikipedia this story is B.S..

We then trekked to Jack Daniel's only competitor: the tiny George Dickel company. Really the best part of that trip was being able to say "Dickel" over and over in polite company.

We ended our trip back in Nashville with some Elliston Place Soda Shop milkshakes and then BAM! Trip was over.