Blood and Whiskey

The first-ever biography of the man who created America's most famous whiskey Born in Lynchburg, Tennessee, in 1850, Jack Daniel became a legendary moonshiner at age 15 before launching a legitimate distillery ten years later. By the time he died in 1911, he was an American legend-and his Old No. 7 Tennessee sipping whiskey was an international sensation, the winner of gold medals at the St. Louis World's Fair and the Liege International Exposition in Belgium. Blood and Whiskey captures Daniel's indomitable rise in the rough-edged world of the nineteenth-century whiskey trade-and shows how his commitment to quality (his whiskey was always charcoal-filtered) and his flair for marketing and packaging (he launched his distinctive square bottle in 189-5) helped create one of America's most venerable and recognizable brands.

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1 The Cursed Child 7 2 Everything Gone but the Dirt 25 3 Legend of the Boy Distiller 42 4 The Nomad 64 5 Reunion and Challenge 75 6 A Rebellion against the Government 92 7 Identity Crisis 107 8 Seizing the Legendary Hollow 120 9 Taking On Nashville 136 10 Big Man, Lonely Man 155 11 Brand Magic 166 12 Enemies 178 13 Reborn 191 14 The Final Battle 204 Epilogue Lem’s Trials 215 Afterword The Making of a Legend 227 Notes 235 Bibliography 257 Index 261