Hardly a soul would have heard of the little town of Lynchburg in the south-eastern corner of Tennessee had the 16-year-old Jack Daniel not distilled a very special whisky there in 1866. Nor would Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House near the market square exist any longer were it not for the 250,000 tourists who come to visit Jack Daniel’s Distillery and the village of 361 inhabitants each year. There Randy Baxter (or one of the other 20 tour guides) shows visitors how bourbon is gradually made from at least 51 percent corn, a little rye, malted barley, yeast and a lot of iron-free spring water. He proudly points to the huge steel vats in which the mash is concocted from these ingredients and stewed – for six days, by when the sugar in the grain will have turned to alcohol. It smells a bit like an old bakery, and is as warm as one too.

“Call-me-Randy!” leads his retinue of visitors on towards the 30-metre-high copper pot stills from which crystal-clear 70-percent alcohol is dripping. But only after it has been stored for at least two years in charred maple oak casks does this liquid earn the label “whisky”. The wood casks are what give it its amber colour and sweet taste, since artificial colour and aroma additives are prohibited by law. If this weren’t Tennessee but the neighbouring state of Kentucky, we would now be tasting what has matured in barrels and then bottled as bourbon. “But not at Jack Daniel’s,” Randy exclaims wagging his finger, as he takes us into another building that houses huge wooden vats. Before the barrels are filled with the clear spirit it is filtered through a layer of charcoal over three-and-a-half metres thick, which takes some twelve days. The wood required for this “charcoal mellowing” procedure, which Jack Daniel’s has patented, comes, as it has done for the last 130 years, from local maple trees. This elaborate filtering process removes the very pungent aromas, making the whisky “very smooth”, as Randy emphasizes with rapturous eyes.

On we go into the store, where Jack Daniel’s is matured for at least four years in casks made of American white oak. They are manufactured in the distillery-owned Blue Grass Cooperage, one of America’s two most important producers of barrels still in operation. But even though we’ve now reached the end of the tour, we’re still not given any whisky to taste – the consumption of alcohol in Lynchburg is prohibited.

Change of scene: we’ve moved 201 kilometres north-west to Woodford County, Kentucky. It’s the home of the country’s oldest and smallest distillery, Labrot & Graham, which like Jack Daniel’s is owned by Brown-Forman. Whisky is known to have been made here on the idyllic distillery premises in Versailles as early as in 1812, by Elijah Pepper. A lot of money (some 7.5 million US dollars) and care went into refurbishing the old distillery. Since 1996 master distiller Lincoln Henderson has been making “Woodford Reserve”, an extraordinarily complex and well-balanced Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey with a palate of vanilla and caramel, fruit, butter and nuts. In 1997 it was voted “Whiskey of the Year” and in 2000 and 2001 “Best Bourbon”.

So what’s the secret of Woodford Reserve? Henderson puts 70 percent corn into his mash, more than the 51 percent stipulated by law. He selects his ageing casks with extreme care and dilutes the whisky with local limestone water. As in Lynchburg, the clocks in Versailles also tick somewhat slower. People allow themselves and their whisky plenty of time. And that’s good for both.