Dickel

[mike1]

I received a little booklet in the mail touting the reopening of the Dickel Distillery for tours. Has anyone been to this place? and is it worth the visit. I think that it is in operation again,although they are bottling Dickel somewhere else

[TNbourbon]

Actually, you've been able to arrange tours privately since Dickel began distilling again in Fall 2003, though they've recently begun public tours again.

I don't think I'd plan an out-of-state trip around Dickel by itself, but Jack Daniel's is just one county over (about 25 miles away, so you can easily combine them). A couple of interesting things about Dickel:

<ul type="square">[*]they have a single-story, metal-sided rickhouse, the only one of its kind, I think;

[*]they have a working post office on-site -- unique in the distillery business -- so you can send yourself a postcard from Dickel, Tennessee 37388 (although the Dickel company sends its correspondence from nearby Tullahoma);

[*]Dickel's maple-leaching operation differs from Jack Daniel's -- it's done in a chilled room through finely-granulated maple charcoal, where JD essentially simply leaches it through the remains of an open-air fire pile (well, maybe not that simple, but that's how they make the charcoal, and it's used unchilled).

It is true that before their 4-year distilling hiatus, they tanked the whisky (they don't us the 'e') to Kentucky for bottling. I don't know if they still do that or not, but I suspect they didn't build a bottling line while waiting to see if they survived during that time.

[ratcheer]

Tim,

I had heard that they were doing their bottling in Canada and shipping the product back to the U.S. I couldn't imagine why the did that, but that was what I heard.

Tim

[mike1]

yep. I have a bottle that was bottled in Canada. I have seen other bottles in the package store that were bottleed elsewhere. I think tha Dickel is sent to plants that bottle simernov. The tour brochure says that the bottling aspect of the product is shown in a film. I guess that Dickel is distilled and aged in Tenn and trucked off to a diagio plant somewhere.