subject: How Jack Daniel's Whiskey insures quality [print this page] How Jack Daniel's Whiskey insures quality
PRLog (Press Release) Dec 01, 2010 On a bright and beautiful sunny day in October, Sherlock's dispatched Craig Maske, General Manager and Stephen Gross, ReadyLaunch.com, to Lynchburg, TN to meet with Jeff Arnett, Jack Daniel's Master Distiller. Te purpose of the meeting? To hand pick, with Jeff, a barrel of Jack Daniel's tennessee whiskey to bottle and sell through Sherlock's Atlanta area locations.
During this visit, Craig and friends had the exclusive opportunity to sit down with Jeff and learn about the, behind the scenes, way that Jack Daniel's insures the quality of their top selling Jack Daniel's Whiskey. Here is an excerpt from this high powered interview.
Jeff: A lot of what is quality for us has to do with our standards of identity. There are plenty of whiskeys out there that would be "quality whiskeys" but they're not necessarily Jack Daniels whiskeys, so a lot of learning what those expectations were, were basically learning the control standards for the family brands, single barrel in particular because we allow a range there. There is no exact standard for it so there's some expected movement in the balance of sweet to oak character that we would have in it, the level of intensity that it should have. I had only been here about 3 or 4 mos when I got on the master tasters panel. That really kind of helped shape my understanding of what's expected of each brand.
Steve: So Master Taster's panel is
Jeff: Master Taster's panel first time I walked in on it These are kind of the guardians of the brand. I'm the head of the panel. Jimmy is master distiller. The first time I participated in it I had only been here probably less than a year and I counted up the years of experience in the room. There were 6 or 7 people there that day that had 200 yrs of experience with Jack Daniels with tasting and quality so that's kind of the body or the long term stewards of Jack Daniels in the quality and the consistency that we take forward. I had only been there about 3 or 4 months and I had the opportunity to take over single barrel processing. Of the 13 years that single barrel has been in the market, 9 of those have been under my care. I really kind of consider single barrel to be my baby, if you will, because I've kind of had a lot to do with shaping it, protecting it, ensuring its quality going forward. I was one of two people that tasted every barrel over 5 years to let it go to market.
Steve: You tasted every barrel for 5 years?
Jeff: Yep, you're talking about 30-40 a day. It takes two expert tasters on every barrel to decide to let it go and that's after the master panel approves on the lot.
Steve: When do you taste it?
Jeff: At 40 proof and typically like for a master panel, we do it around 10 o'clock in the morning. You want to be awake from breakfast, before lunch. You don't want to have recently brushed your teeth. Anything that can kind of influence or make an off-flavor for you. People who are smokers or anything like that, we make sure they haven't drank a cup of coffee, had a smoke, done anything that would somehow hinder the pallet. So we typically schedule them at 10am. We have about 10 people who are qualified to sit in on the panel. We typically look for at least 7 of them to be here. Some of them travel in So we basically, if we can get a formal 7 together, we basically do a master panel. That will approve the lot for single barrel. You're looking for intensity of character across every barrel in the lot but you don't taste them all. You may look at 30 barrels to approve 500 and then one of those people from the master taster's panel, there will be two of them actually. For every barrel that comes in, they basically have to taste those to really ensure that each individual barrel in that lot
More of this interview will be released soon....
The hand picked whiskey will be delivered and available for sale on December 6, 2010. Just in time for the holidays!
For more information on Sherlocks please visit:http://www.Sherlocks.com
welcome to Insurances.net (https://www.insurances.net)
