“I wouldn’t say we’re the kings of Tennessee whiskey,” Tim Piersant says. “I’ll give that up to Jack.”
Jack, of course, refers to Jack Daniel, who established his distillery in 1866 and died in 1911. Piersant, who founded the craft distillery Chattanooga Whiskey a hundred years after Daniel’s death, doesn’t even pretend he can challenge Jack for name recognition or sales volume. But when it comes to quality and distinctiveness, he’s aiming to occupy a prominent seat at what has become a crowded table of Tennessee distillers seeking to distinguish themselves in the whiskey world—especially from that other state just north.
Before Prohibition, Tennessee and Kentucky were both prodigious whiskey producers. Liquor retailers advertised the finest “Tennessee and Kentucky Whiskey,” as if they were one region. Then came the shuttering of distilleries under Prohibition, and after repeal, Kentucky galloped ahead while restrictive state laws hobbled its southern neighbor. By the mid-1990s, just three active distilleries called Tennessee home, down from nearly two hundred prior to Prohibition.
Since then, the state has been making up for lost time. Inspired by and named after the African American mentor to Jack Daniel, Nearest Green Distillery emerged from founder Fawn Weaver’s research into history. Charles Nelson’s great-great-great-grandsons revived Nelson’s Green Briar, a Tennessee brand prominent in the nineteenth century. Sugarlands, which initially marketed itself as one of dozens of “moonshiners” that cropped up in eastern Tennessee, has been producing a very fine rye whiskey. Even Cascade Hollow, the longtime home of George Dickel Tennessee Whisky, has been issuing new releases under the guidance of creative master distiller Nicole Austin, some in partnership with small craft distillers, including the Dickel x Leopold Bros. blend of ryes made with equipment and techniques long since passed by.
Piersant, a Chattanooga native, distinguished his brand by leaning in to an earlier popular style—malt whiskey, traditionally made with malted barley. His Tennessee High Malt is a bourbon at heart—the primary grain is corn—but employs three styles of malted grains that give the result more backbone and a faint toasted cereal quality.
“We want to be the best value craft product in Tennessee,” Piersant says, “and we believe we’ve earned it based on our Tennessee High Malt and everything we’ve put into that.” (In addition to Chattanooga Whiskey’s main production distillery, he also operates a smaller “Experimental Distillery” downtown, where visitors can sample some of his adventures in grain, such as the Islay-adjacent Triple Peat whiskey, aged in former Scotch barrels.)
You can sip his Tennessee High Malt bourbon neat or with one large ice cube. But it also has enough body to stand up in a variety of cocktails, as in this whiskey highball variation, made with a mix of ginger ale and club soda and a few dashes of bitters. A less sugary twist on the standard Jack-and-ginger, the drink looks back to summer with its bubbly effervescence, and ahead to fall with the malty notes reminiscent of the moors. By way of Tennessee, of course.
