Blood and Whiskey

Book excerpt: 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.