Around the Barrel Ep050/Re049 - Chris Fletcher

 

Lucas Hendrickson: When you do something well and for an extended period of time, two competing thoughts can come into your head. First, if it ain't broke, don't break it, and second, let's see how we can break it creatively.

On this episode, we talk with Jack Daniel's master distiller, Chris Fletcher, about the busy year he's had so far, about the three new expressions that are new to store shelves, but took a long time – on purpose – to get there, and about getting back out in the world after spending the last couple of years at home, Around the Barrel.

Welcome to the season five premiere of Around the Barrel, the official podcast from the makers of Jack Daniel's. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrickson.

Chris Fletcher: Hi, my name is Chris Fletcher and I'm the master distiller at the Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee.

Lucas: Chris Fletcher, welcome back to Around the Barrel.

Chris: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Lucas: Welcome to season five of this project. It seems unbelievable that we're –

Chris: Hard to believe.

Lucas: – doing this for as long as we have. And you've had some life changes, some business changes, some career changes, life, all that stuff in the middle of it. And in the wake of the timeframe that we've had between episodes here, you've put some new stuff out into the world over the bulk of 2022. Let's just jump right in and talk about this bottled-in-bond series that hit the markets not that long ago.

Chris: Yeah, back in May. We're very excited to offer these two whiskeys from Jack Daniel's. Bottled-in-bond, they are both bottled-in-bond whiskeys, but yet they're very, very different. In fact, I've jokingly called one like a fastball right down the middle of the plate and the other a curve ball. And it's really, really exciting to offer one that's very traditional, classic Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey flavor profile, and then offer another one that really gives folks a lot different flavor, certainly a different finish, but then also bottled-in-bond and that whole regulation and how strict and stringent that regulation is, possibly the most stringent whiskey regulation in the world, in my opinion. And to be able to do it with three different types of straight whiskeys, of course all done at Jack Daniel's, it's really cool. I don't know that there's ever been a whiskey release like our triple mash, bottled-in-bond whiskey.

Lucas: Right. But this isn't the first bottled-in-bond project that's been done with the company over the years, right? There were some limited edition stuff, maybe special releases over the years. And what was the origin of wanting to put these two things together out into the market at this point?

Chris: Yeah, I would say bottled-in-bond is something we never did much of at all. You saw it very limited. Anything from us that's offered at 100 proof, we probably have the option to label it as bottled-in-bond if we wanted. Because we make all of our whiskey at our one distillery, it's all done there, so nothing is coming in from any other distillery or through any other DSP, distilled spirits permit, so it's all distilled at Tennessee No. 1, DSP No. 1. The quick rules of bottled-in-bond are: it's from a single distiller, obviously what we just said, Tennessee No. 1; has to be distilled within a distilling season.

That's the one thing that could get a little tricky for us, or anyone that would want to do a bottle-in-bond whiskey, is distilling season is a six-month window, so January through the end of June is the spring season every year. And then July 1st through the end of the calendar year is the fall distilling season. Those are the only two seasons. It could be a little tricky right at the end of June or right at the turn of the new year, where you might have barrels from one day was New Year's Eve and the next day is New Year's Day whiskey, but that is a bit unlikely. It's generally not a huge thing for us.

What that does is it keeps you from blending, if you had mostly a very young whiskey, if you had a few barrels of a much older product to try to maybe cover some things up. It's sort of like a vintage in wine, so to speak, in some ways.

And so, beyond that, it has to be a minimum of four years old – Lucas, I know you know all of this – all of our whiskeys are at least four years old, some much older, but all minimum four years old, what we're doing here for the US. And then the last thing is 100 proof in the bottle to go along with a federally bonded barrel house. All barrel houses, though, are bonded. That's sometimes overlooked, that is part of the regulation. But when you're storing non-tax paid spirits, that is bonded to the federal government for that guarantee of paying tax.

Lucas: I gotcha. How does that differ from what other distilleries might have to do in creating a bottled-in-bond product for themselves? Do they end up in that same situation where all of their barrel houses are in that similar situation?

Chris: Yes.

Lucas: Okay, yeah.

Chris: Yep. It's the same for everyone. Anyone that has a bottled-in-bond offering or following it. Anybody that's aging spirits, period, in the US, is doing it in a bonded facility.

Lucas: Gotcha. So they're not dedicated barrel houses on site in Lynchburg that are devoted to this product set, right?

Chris: No.

Lucas: Okay.

Chris: All 94 are bonded barrel houses, every single one of them.

Lucas: Yeah. I'm assuming that the bonded product is what you were describing as the fastball down the middle.

Chris: Yes.

Lucas: That flavor profile that everybody has known for as long as they have responsibly had Jack Daniel's Old No. 7, but just amped up a little bit. Can you give us an idea of what that flavor profile looks like with that product?

Chris: Yeah. We started thinking about that product and we were talking about – one word, and that was bold – about, I want to say, six years ago, something like that. And obviously knowing that proof is a very easy way to get bigger, bolder flavors there. We settled in, narrowed in on 100 proof fairly quickly. And then really because of all those bottled-in-bond regulations that we just talked about. And you think about the current state of American whiskey where there are hundreds, literally hundreds of different brands of American whiskeys on the shelf today that consumers are seeing. And there's not a lot of transparency in some cases. If you think about those hundreds of brands, there's probably less than 10 distilleries making the majority of them. Quick math right there, that's easy to figure out. There's a lot of brands, but there's not a lot of different whiskeys.

There's a lot of the same whiskeys going into multiple offerings. Well, obviously to be bottled-in-bond, you have to disclose exactly where that whiskey's made. As you know, we've long prided ourselves on transparency and openness. Everyone knows that bottle of Jack Daniel's, whether you're at a bar in Nashville, Tennessee, here, or if you're halfway around the globe, you see that black and white label and that square bottle, you know where it came from and you know the quality of what's in that bottle.

And so this bottled-in-bond regulation and designation really is just a way to highlight that. And it was originally thought of, actually, as a consumer protection act. It's really the first food safety act ever passed way back in the late 1800s. And so we felt like the time was right for a Jack Daniel's bottled-in-bond offering.

And if you look at it too, within our lineup, if you just take a step back and take a broader look at Gentlemen Jack, Old No. 7 classic, 80 proof, very easy sipping whiskey, great to mix, don't get me wrong, absolutely. But then to get into those bigger, bolder flavor profiles, you go to our single barrel range and single barrel, absolutely one of my favorite products we have, but you get barrel to barrel variation. You fall in love with a bottle that you buy, if you don't find that same number on that bottle, it'll taste a little different, which is the beauty of single barrel, but it's also the –

Lucas: The perils of single barrel.

Chris: – the perils of single barrel. And so we really felt like there was this gap in the lineup. And so the flavor profile on the bonded, is going to certainly skew more in that single barrel range, obviously with the understanding that single barrel varies, but 100 proof and it also says on the label, "specially selected barrels." And that might be a bit confusing there, or it might look like just something that we're trying to fill space, it's not. We are actually targeting barrels for darker whiskey coming out of the barrel. You can just look, if I can move the bottle and not get in trouble here. You can tell that this bonded whiskey is actually a little bit darker than the triple mash. That is because we are targeting these barrels that are going to provide a richer, darker color coming out of it.

Generally upper floors in the house and things. As you know, that there's no perfect science to this, but when we dump these barrels, we are literally looking for those darker barrels to blend into this batch of what we know as Jack Daniel's Bonded Whiskey. So you're going to get certainly a lot more oak tones, more barrel forward flavors, more a dry baking spice, burnt brown sugar, a little bit of those cinnamon baking cookies through the mid-palate and certainly more oak and spice on the finish. And make no mistake about it, even though the mixability for our other brands are fantastic, like we said, for bonded, we wanted something that was going to stand up in these classic, really whiskey-forward classic cocktails. Your Old Fashioneds, your Manhattans, your Sazeracs, whatever the case may be. We wanted something that the whiskey was going to shine through very clearly, no matter what these folks behind the bar want to do with it.

Lucas: Yeah. And then you got the change-up in the line with the Triple Mash. I'll just let you unpack what that is. Obviously it's a new expression, it's a combination of expressions and part of it is a brand-new product. Unpack all that for us, because it's a fantastic liquid.

Chris: Yeah, I'm glad you like my change-up description there, it makes me feel validated. The Triple Mash was certainly something that we started thinking about later on. And in fact, myself, and our innovation team, was approached by one of our marketing folks that had this idea and they thought it was very interesting that they were reading about people that were blending whiskeys at home. Literally bought different types of bottles off the shelf, bringing them home, mixing, vatting them together, letting it sit for a few days. I don't know. I've never done this.

Lucas: Right, you haven't had to.

Chris: Yeah, I've got a big cupboard back in Lynchburg. Anyway, he said, "This is really interesting, this idea of blending," and full disclosure, Lucas, I was like, "Ah, I don't know how good of a blender I really am." I've worked with some great blenders in my career, thankfully. And I was a bit hesitant really, because American blended whiskey is such a wide open box. You only technically have to put 20% whiskey in a American blended whiskey.

Lucas: Okay. I didn't realize it was that low.

Chris: Yeah, it is. And it has to be disclosed on the label or the back label, but 20% or 25%, some are 49 or 51%. There's different varying levels of that out there. And that's not what Jack Daniel's has ever been about. And so I think that was my first hesitation, just a narrow-minded reaction around blended whiskey in general. And I thought, "Well, if we do this, though, we do have different straight whiskeys that we can use. First and foremost, this will be a blend of all straight whiskeys, all 100% whiskey. There's no neutral spirit, there's nothing else added to this, so it's all straight whiskeys." And so that was important to me.

And then as I was going through and looking obviously at Tennessee Whiskey lights, we've been making rye whiskey, as well. And since 2013, we have been distilling what we've called our American single malt, which is, and there is fresh, hot off the press from the TTB legislation starting to get talked about around what American single malt will be.

Lucas: Crafting that deal definition of what that's going to be moving forward. And I know as we are speaking, we're in a public comments section on that, so there's a lot of moving parts as far as that goes. But I didn't realize that it's been since 2013 that you guys have been working on what is now a component of Triple Mash.

Chris: That's right. We didn't tell many people, but it was really challenging. This is a 100% malted barley whiskey, hence why we were referring to it as American single malt, charcoal mellowed, just like we do our Tennessee whiskey. And then also aged in our new toasted and charred oak barrels. And so that, in our opinion, in the Jack Daniel's view, we felt like that was how if Mr. Jack was here today and he was going to make a single malt, we felt like that would be the route he would take. And so that's why we chose to keep that process the same. And so, as I started looking at what we could do to blend, because like I said earlier, there's a pretty nice pantry of barrels down in Lynchburg. We've got a few sitting around to look at.

And that was what some of my colleagues in the marketing side was like, "Well, we've got a pretty big bucket of paint to go in and look at a lot of different colors to mix together." It's interesting, the breakdown on this is 60% rye, so the base really is the rye whiskey. Our rye whiskey, and I think it is the ultimate cocktail rye whiskey because you have a lot of sweetness to balance the rye spice – 70% rye grain bill, plenty of rye character in the mid-palate, but there's a nice, signature Jack Daniel sweet fruity note at the beginning that I think is just really, really interesting to build flavors on top of. And so that's why we went with 60% rye whiskey as the base spirit for this. And then we started just playing with the ratio of our malt in our Tennessee whiskey.

Ultimately we netted out at a 20/20% on the back end, so 60% rye whiskey, 20% Tennessee whiskey, 20% malt whiskey. And so I talked about that sweet and spice balance of the rye. The malt character really comes out right in the mid-palate, and malt is not as sweet as corn, it's not as spicy as rye, but it does have this almost like a toasted piece of bread or a browned biscuit. And it actually creates a bit of that texture in the mid-palate as well. It sits. And so when you sip on that triple mash, I always tell people, just put a drop, just let it linger in the middle of your tongue for a couple of seconds because number one, that's where the spicy character of the rye starts to show. And then that's also where that texture and creamy mouth feel from the malt starts to come through. And then that last 20% Tennessee whiskey just sweetens it up on the end.

Lucas: It really is the best of all of those worlds. I've had it, and you get the spice, you get the vanilla notes, the sweetness of the Old No. 7. And then again, the breadiness almost craft beer little thing coming off the single malt as well. Even someone with a immature palate like me, can figure out, you can just pull all of those individual flavors out of that liquid. It's fascinating. Y'all have done them an amazing job on that.

Chris: Thank you. Yeah, I think certainly credit Lexie, and she said it so perfectly one day at a tasting, I was listening and she said, "I love this Triple Mash because you taste each individual whiskey, each individual component is there, but yet, they all come together and compliment each other at the end." So I think that's the perfect way to describe it and couldn't be happier with it. And I love both of these offerings. They're so unique and so different. And if you do the breakdown on that Triple Mash, if you take our actual grain bills, it's 60% rye whiskey liquid, but that's a 70% rye grain bill, 12% malted barley, 18% corn, of course the 100% malt and then the 80 corn, 12 malt, 8 rye for Tennessee Whiskey.

If you do that, if you do the math, multiply it out and weight the averages of that, it comes out to be like a high-rye bourbon or high-rye Tennessee ratio, at the end of the day. I was in Atlanta and we tasted this and a young lady, we were in a store there and really beautiful small, boutique package store. And she tasted it and she said, "Wow, it really comes across a high-rye bourbon. And then, a light bulb went off in my brain that I thought, "You are exactly right. You're really good." Because if you do the math, that's exactly where it comes out. Again, it gives folks with a classic cocktail application that look for a little more spice in their whiskey. But yet, it's also so interesting and intriguing to just sip on neat or with a cube, it's really special.

Lucas: Well, and the thing is, and correct me if I'm wrong, these products are here to stay.

Chris: Yes.

Lucas: It's not like they're limited edition things and you got to hunt for them. And so the availability's going to be there and the price point is there, as a recommended price on those, it's an affordable, high-quality premium expressions that are just a little bit different. And for the Jack fans around the world, it just gives them another little look at what you're able to accomplish coming out of Lynchburg.

Chris: Absolutely. I think they're fantastic products at a perfect price. And that's something we're very conscious of as well, not to just put something in a fancy bottle and quadruple the price. We want people to believe in the quality and the value of Jack Daniel's. And we've been working on that for over 150 years. That's something that's not lost on us for sure.

Lucas: And they're good looking bottles too. They look fantastic on store shelves and on people's individual bars.

Chris: Yeah, they are. It's really cool, this bottle is actually a bit of a throwback or a nod to the bottle that Jack was using when that regulation was passed in 1897. That kind of embossing and even the back of the bottle is just as beautiful there, but a nod to that old 1895 bottle. Like with the 10-year-old, what we did with the old cartouche to mimic the old aged edge cartouche that he used. And I love that, I take zero credit on any design work or artistic ability, but our design team just, wow, beautiful package.

Lucas: Yeah. Are there other things to come in this series or is this what's here for now and seeing what's coming on down the road?

Chris: You will certainly see more bottled-in-bond expressions from Jack Daniel's, nothing anytime soon. But back to the package, I think everybody sees how gorgeous it is. And I think, too, again, the bottled-in-bond regulation, I think it's probably as relevant now as it's been, at least since right after prohibition, where again, became that symbol of, almost like a symbol of de facto quality, because you knew it was disclosed, again, exactly who made this whiskey, and you knew it was at least four years old, it was exactly 100 proof. You had that transparency when you put the bottled-in-bond reg on there. And so I think it's just hand-in-glove almost for what we do and what we try to uphold as whiskey makers in Lynchburg, so you'll definitely see more bottled-in-bond from Jack Daniel's.

Lucas: Sure. Is there a potential for one of those things being a full-blown, American single malt coming down the pike, or can you break some news for us?

Chris: Never say never. Yes, you will also see our single malt, absolutely you will. Like I say, we've been making this since 2013, it's been a lot of work. We've been doing a lot of different things with that malt. It was really, really challenging. Just even in the distillery, that malt being very light, more protein heavy for sure – protein rich I should say – light and heavy in the same sentence, doesn't –

Lucas: No, yeah.

Chris: Tendency to foam, is the big thing. Put that stuff in fermenters and it can literally come alive as it foams and that fermentation really starts to get rocking and rolling. And so just a lot of things that we learned the hard way back in 2013, 2014. I would tell you, it took – now we didn't make malt every day for two years, it was very few and far between. But it took us a while to really line out just the physical process of what we felt good about, what we were doing with our malt. And we will be looking to add some more offerings of our standalone American single malt very soon. And so you'll see that coming from Jack Daniel's as well.

Lucas: Okay. We have the regular ongoing bonded series stuff as well, but you also had a highly coveted, new small batch release that grew out of your special release stuff from last year. Talk about this interesting little bottle in front of us with the small batch, Coy Hill special release.

Chris: Yeah, lots to talk about here on not a lot of liquid, unfortunately. Yeah, the Coy Hill single barrel special release that we did last year, I would say probably generated as much excitement as any whiskey as we've ever released, at least in that line for sure. And we had probably a couple hundred barrels or so that we were working off of, off those very top floors, that top layer of those two houses on Coy Hill and there were 55 barrels left over at the end of the day. And that might sound strange, leftover barrels or what was wrong? Nothing at all was wrong with them, the whiskey was fantastic. It was one of two things, either the whiskey was so high proof, we didn't feel like the regular single barrel package would be able to contain it, if it got warm. We thought that it would literally, because in the top part of this bottle there is vapor, there's obviously vaporized whiskey in the headspace, as we call it.

And so alcohol, ethanol, is very reactive to heat, that's what forces it into the pores of the wood when it gets hot in the summer. So that's a very good thing that whiskey will do that. But when it's in the bottle, it only has one place to go and that's up and out. And so anything that was over 150 proof, we didn't feel like that single barrel package could contain it, if it got hot. If somebody bought a bottle and then they lived in a warm weather climate and they put it in their trunk or something, or even their back seat, and went in and got their groceries and then came out, and then the whiskey would be leaking, literally forcing the cork up and out, so that was one thing.

And then the other thing was just sheer evaporation, or both, because that typically goes hand in hand. The more evaporation it does typically concentrate the alcohol depending on what floor that the barrel comes from. But the top floor, certainly you are going to concentrate alcohol, you're going to force more water out more quickly. And so if you only have a gallon or two gallons left in a 53 gallon barrel, that's not enough to even push through and filter it effectively as a single barrel. That was what we were left with were these 55 barrels. And so we worked with it, with our team in warehousing and processing and Chris Ray and Jason Marsky, John Lee, and these guys that are so, so good at what they do and helping us get these things together.

We worked together to sort those 55 barrels and basically composite them down into five individual batches. Each of these five batches were, at most, the size of a standard barrel, so about 50 gallons was the biggest batch from these 55 barrels left over. And now, they weren't equally distributed, it wasn't all in one. We literally targeted barrels based on what we had, what we thought we were going for, for the flavors and the proofs and what would work well with others, to try to give these five different expressions. And I think the lowest proof netted out around 147-ish.

Lucas: Which is still insane.

Chris: Yeah, it was just still not little. The highest was just over a 155, which to be honest, I've never seen anything like that come out of a standard 53 gallon barrel. Smaller barrels, experimented with those many, many times over 20 years. And that will push proof higher quickly because of the surface area and the ratio of wood to liquid and how water will come through even faster. Cycling barrel houses, heating them up. We don't do that. You would think, my brain – common sense would tell me, if we were pumping heat in there, 365 days a year to try to... As you know, all of our houses are just naturally heated.

Lucas: They are what they are.

Chris: Right, it's August right now, they're hot. Well come back in January, they're cold. And so if you stop and you think about it, Mother Nature did all this, she did it all on a 53 gallon barrel. I wish we could take a lot of credit on it, but we can't. We've really not tracked exit proof a lot out of – We started single barrel, barrel proof about what, five years ago or so. And so we've started to look at that and see, and its effect on flavor obviously is huge. Proof really, as we talked about with Bonded, we know proof drives a lot of flavor and it's just part of the fact of our business.

But to be able to create these five batches all very, very small, that's the unfortunate part is Mother Nature took a lot from us, but that was another reason to put it in this small bottle, the 375. We got double the amount of bottles out there. We sold it Tennessee-only, majority at the distillery itself, to try to do it the best way possible. We know we didn't make everybody happy because everyone couldn't get their hands on it, but we did everything we could to try to get it out to as many hands as possible.

Lucas: Is there a physical difference in that bottle other than just size? Was anything done with the cork, anything done with the seal around it? What did you have to physically do to make that a different kind of package?

Chris: Yeah, the cork itself, and I'm not a packaging engineer at all and I've got great friends that are, and they're going to, if they listen to this, they're probably going to laugh at me, but I'll try to explain as best I can. Basically this cork, it's a natural product. It's all coming from cork trees and whatnot. But when they form that cork and it's molded into the shape that it is, they have a compression rating. And so the tighter you compress that cork, literally the less give it has into it.

And our standard cork is actually the same size cork that goes in the 750, but the compression that they did was much tighter. It's going to make it a much firmer cork that's going to then close that off and then contain as, if the whiskey does get warm and it starts to push and force up, you have a much firmer, tighter seal on that bottle. And so that was something that we did and we did tests, quality tests on this to see how high we felt like it would hold, and we felt like it would hold well over 160 with this high compression, so we felt good. We topped out at 155.1.

Lucas: Just to be on the safe side, a little bit.

Chris: Right? Yeah.

Lucas: One little small piece of package innovation though. Does that help you figure out what future products could benefit from that? Does that compression on that cork, is that a more expensive process than what your traditional corks do? Do you possibly switch it over or what can you take from this project that you can apply to the line moving forward?

Chris: Well, the biggest thing that we've done in looking, and you see this two new packages, you wouldn't know it, but obviously the cork is a new element to this package. Pretty much what we've done throughout our lineup now with the glass and the closures that we use is test to failure. And we had never really done that. We'd always just known, well we know it'll hold 80, 90, 100, the basic points. But as we've gone through innovation over the last several years, and it's been something that I've been lucky enough to be involved with since 2014, it just became obvious. We need to look at every single package that we have that we would use and know exactly how far we can push it. And this product right here, certainly, pushed it to the limit. Because I don't know that we'll ever be able to repeat a proof that high.

Because, again, we can't control it. There is nothing that we did to create that. And so, Coy Hill, we've got a handful of amazing barrel houses up there and it makes great, great whiskey. It's not just about the proof, that's not what it is. Had this whiskey finished out at 125 instead of 155, it would've still been beautiful and amazing whiskey with amazing flavors. Those houses are just, so many people at the distillery just have this nostalgic love for Coy Hill barrel houses, they're some of our oldest ones. It is the highest elevation, too, you can see a couple of them as you're driving through town that dot the hills. And so there's always been that love for those old rick barrel houses up there and they make great whiskey. And I hope people agree that get their hands on this bottle.

Lucas: What's on the horizon, what's in the works that we can talk about now? And do you have an idea of, obviously you probably do, and what the special release will look like for this fall and winter? What can we tease out?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Special release, we're trying to get that going as soon as possible. We're hoping to bottle it very soon. Should hit this fall. I don't know an exact date right now. I'm still waiting on a little bit of things to come in so we can get that bottled. But that will be a malt whiskey that will be one of our versions of our single malt. We're looking at continuing in that and what we can do to put what we feel is the best single malt whiskey out there. But we will start there with our special release this year, this fall. We are also pretty much ready to go with our 10-year-old batch two and 12-year-old batch one.

Lucas: Excellent.

Chris: The whiskeys, Lexie and I started looking at those just a month or two back, sorting through different barrel samples and what do we think, where do we want to go with that. And we feel really good with where we're at. It's very exciting. Those will probably be early 2023, however, before we're going to be able to get them in the bottle and get it out the door. But that will be again, an ongoing annual release. We are continuing to look at what we're doing. I think the other day I was looking at things well into like 2032 to 2034. Yeah, that's pretty cool when you're sitting there thinking about, "Wow, this is some forethought into this product."

Lucas: Yeah. You guys find yourself in the sometimes odd position of having to live not only in the present and how to just solve the problems right in front of you in the moment, but also a decade from now. And plotting out what growth path and prognostication on what the American whiskey scene's going to look like, 10 years from now.

Chris: Yeah, it's difficult. I think that's why I get a little fewer hairs up here every day it seems. And I say that only halfway jokingly because we're going to be wrong. It's just how wrong are we going to be? We're not going to make it exactly the amount that we need in four or five or 12 or 15, whatever years it's going to be. We'll be off a little bit, but the quality of the whiskey won't be off and that's the most important thing.

Lucas: Sure. What's it been like to be back out on the road and putting these products in front of people? Obviously for two plus years, it was a little more difficult to do that and you made do with virtual appearances and things like that, but I just recently saw a shot of you at the National Press Club in DC talking with those folks and you've been able to press the flesh a little bit more now than you had been for your entire time as master distiller. What's it been like to finally be able to do that?

Chris: Yeah, it's been great. I love sharing our product with people. That's why we do it. Everyone in Lynchburg, all of our whiskey making team and the families that have been involved with our distillery for generations, we are very proud of the product we make, because people enjoy it and we hope that people enjoy it and certainly enjoy it responsibly, a hundred percent. But there's something about our product, I think, that makes people happy and they enjoy it and they know and they trust the quality of whiskey that's coming out of Lynchburg, again over 150 years. There's something social to that and it's just not the same through a screen and I know everybody has experienced that the last couple of years and I am excited to be on the road. 

It is different. We have a two-year-old at home now, so it's hard to leave him for sure. But typically I'm not gone too long for too many days and I can get back home and recharge and energize with him for a few days. But it is fun. And we're launching these globally as well. They're going internationally, so we'll be hitting the road and traveling overseas for the first time since pre-pandemic. And so that also is very, very exciting because we've got a lot of great friends overseas and I'm sure they're listening to the podcast here. And we are very excited to share these products with them as well.

Lucas: Yeah. Well, Chris, again, thanks for spending a little time with us unpacking these fantastic new products available from Jack Daniel's and we look forward to you making a little bit more.

Chris: Thank you, Lucas. We'll do it, I promise.

Lucas: Thanks for joining us Around the Barrel.

Thanks for checking out this episode of Around the Barrel. You can find archived episodes of Around the Barrel on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and more, plus on the web at jackdaniels.com/podcast. And if you like what you hear, please follow, rate and review while you're at it. Cheers y'all and join us next time for more conversations, Around the Barrel.

Your friends at Jack Daniel's remind you to drink responsibly. Jack Daniel's and Old No. 7 are registered trademarks, copyright 2023, Jack Daniel's. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by Volume, 80 proof. Distilled and bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around the Barrel is intended for listeners 21 years of age and older.