Today, we talk about Charcoal.
Welcome to the first of a few series of ideas I had for 2022. Most of the articles I’ve written for Spirit Animal have been pretty in-depth, requiring (for me) a decent amount of formatting. Here, I wanted to get into some smaller-sized ideas called “Yips and Barks” to kind of indicate it’s a little more spur of the moment, off the cuff stuff, which in turn should allow me to get some more writing out there.
Today, and on the heels of my review of the Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel Select, let’s talk about what I think is one of the most eye-rolling sentences you might hear when the subject of bourbon comes up in mixed company and someone has to prove they’re the smartest guy in the room:
“YOU KNOW, JACK DANIEL’S ISN’T A BOURBON.
IT’S A TENNESSEE WHISKEY!”
That line is almost always delivered with a wry smile and dripping with self-congratulation, because they know a thing, and aren’t they clever! But as my friend’s dad likes to say: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.
First, some people feel obligated to make this “correction” because they think Bourbon can only come from Kentucky. Which is straight up untrue. Hudson is in New York, and they make bourbon. Balcones is in Texas, and they make bourbon. Midwest Grain Producers is in Indiana, and they make so much bourbon under contract for so many labels it makes most people’s heads spin when they first find out about it. I think literally every state in the union has somebody making bourbon.
See, Jack Daniel argued way back in the day that his business deserved its own category of whiskey due to what it termed the “Lincoln County process.” This method involves pouring whiskey—bourbon, specifically—over a bunch of densely-packed charcoal to remove impurities. Then the state of Tennessee passed a law saying that if any distillery wanted to call itself “Tennessee Whiskey,” it had to use that same method of charcoal filtration. Except for a brand called Prichard’s, which for one reason or another is exempt!
Digging into the whole thing, the mutual back-patting between Tennessee legislators and the state’s distillers is basically local-level protectionism, not unlike New Mexico’s attempts to legislate the spelling of the world “chile” to differentiate peppers grown by its local farmers from those chili peppers imported from south of the border. As a political tool, I get it, but at the end of the day I still feel like this is some silly, stuffed shirt bullshit.
Also consider this: my bottle of Evan Williams White Label announces that it, too, uses charcoal filtration. I’m sure there are other brand expressions as well, but this is the one on my shelf I can point to. Heaven Hill, a Kentucky-based company, probably does not want to invite the kind of pandemonium that would result from claiming it was a “Tennessee Whiskey” based on its distillation method.
See? Proof!
Does the charcoal filtration make that much of a difference? If you’re asking me and not a Jack Daniel’s brand rep? God, no. The rack-grade, black labeled Jack Daniel’s “Old No. 7” has redeeming qualities, though it’s anything but smooth. The brand’s “Gentleman Jack” brand extension is filtered through charcoal one more time, but I’ll be damned if I can taste any difference between the two pours. As for the Evan Williams White Label, I like the stuff for a “value” bottle, but regular ‘ol bourbons like Elijah Craig or Old Forester blast it right out of the water. Even given the EW: White Label’s charcoal filtering, the stuff is still bracing.
As you might have gathered, I think “Tennessee Whiskey” is a bullshit category since it leans so heavily on what I’d consider a gimmick. Could you imagine the kind of idiocy we’d have with Vodka if every different kind of filtration method—from copper plates, lava rocks, quartz crystals, or tapping the stills with a magic wand—resulted in us having to come up with a new goddamn word for what came out of the still?
Essentially, what we experience now with the JD brand is the equivalent of some dude saying, “I don’t drive a car. I drive a Cadillac.” We’d roll our eyes at that kind of semantic posturing if it came from any other source, but somehow the Jack Daniel’s marketing department gets a collective pass. As for me, I’m digging in my heels: JD is bourbon, “Tennessee Whiskey” is a fake category of liquor, and it’s going to be hard for anyone to tell me otherwise.
