View source for Jack Daniel's/en

Jack Daniel's is a brand of sour mash Tennessee whiskey that is the best selling whiskey in the world. It is known for its square bottles and black label. It is produced in Lynchburg, Tennessee by the Jack Daniel Distillery, which has been owned by the Brown-Forman Corporation since 1956. Despite being the location of a major operational distillery, Jack Daniel's home county of Moore is a dry county, so the product is not available for consumption at stores or restaurants within the county, although the distillery does sell commemorative bottles of whiskey.

Although the product generally meets the regulatory criteria for classification as a straight bourbon, the company disavows this classification and markets it simply as Tennessee whiskey rather than as Tennessee bourbon.

=History=
According to the Jack Daniel's website, founder Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel was born in September 1846, although seemingly no one knows the exact date because the birth records were destroyed in a courthouse fire. If the 1846 date is correct, he might have become a licensed distiller at the age of 20, as the distillery claims a founding date of 1866. Other records list his birth date as September 5, 1846, and in the 2004 biography Blood & Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel, author Peter Krass maintains that land and deed records show that the distillery was actually not founded until 1875. Daniel was one of thirteen children born to Calaway Daniel and Lucinda Cook. Jack Daniel's grandfather, Joseph "Job" Daniel emigrated from Wales as did his Scottish wife to the United States. He was of Welsh, Scottish, English, and Scots-Irish descent. In 2012, a Welshman, Mark Evans, claimed to have discovered the original recipe , in a book written by his great-great-grandmother in 1853, whose brother-in-law emigrated to Tennessee.

Jack died in 1911 from blood poisoning which started from an infection. The infection allegedly began in one of his toes, which Daniel injured one early morning at work by kicking his safe in anger when he could not get it open (he was said to always have had trouble remembering the combination).

=Production Process=

Jack Daniel's whiskey is filtered through sugar maple charcoal in large wooden vats prior to aging, which is an extra step that is not used in making most Bourbon whiskey, and the company claims that this makes the product different than Bourbon. However, Tennessee whiskey is required to be "a straight Bourbon Whiskey" under terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and Canadian law, and there is no other legal definition of the term "Tennessee whiskey" (other than U.S. law governing the definition of "whiskey" in general).

After being used for the aging of Jack Daniel's whiskey, some of the barrels are sold to McIlhenny Company of Avery Island, Louisiana, for production of Tabasco sauce.