Everyone has heard of Jack Daniel, America’s biggest name in whiskey. But not everyone has heard that Jack Daniel recently opened a microbrewery.

Jack Daniel is only one example of a beverage company adding a brewery to an existing operation. Benziger Family Winery will open a brewery in Glen Ellen, Calif., this May, and Korbel Champagne Cellars plans to open one in California, too.

The Jack Daniel Brewery story is unusual. First of all, unlike most breweries featured in this column it is not a mom-and-pop outfit, nor was it started by a homebrewer gone commercial. It is an example of a large company making a calculated effort to get into the brewing business.

The location of Jack Daniel is absolutely bizarre because it is in a dry county. That’s right — the employees make it there, but they can’t sell it there. That would be like making it illegal to drive cars in Detroit, surf in Hawaii, or watch movies in Hollywood. Lynchburg, Tenn., remained dry after Prohibition ended. Jack Daniel made its home in Lynchburg since 1866, so it stayed put. Although the brewery is in Lynchburg, the majority of Jack Daniel’s beer is brewed at Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewery in Cincinnati.

The Lynchburg site is used mostly for testing new beers. Hudepohl-Schoenling is a traditional regional brewery that makes handcrafted beer. The batch size is 150 barrels, an output many microbreweries are approaching.

Another surprise is that such a famous company is based in such a small place. The population of Lynchburg is only 351. After entering the town limits, visitors have to drive more than five miles past cow pastures and corn fields before coming to anything that looks like a town. The quiet town center has a tree-shaded square with the county courthouse in the middle and local merchants crowded around the edge. Residents gather here to play their banjos on Saturday. The pace is almost slow enough for the proverbial yellow dog to lie down in the middle of the road and not be run over by a car. The entrance to the distillery is located just a block from the town center.

Although distillery-brewery tours run daily, visitors must trek the block back downtown to get to the gift shop. This is a conscious effort to draw tourists to other downtown businesses, says Brewmaster John Barrett.

Head Brewer Marty Winslow says adjusting to the local pace and customs was a challenge. True, Winslow had first learned to brew in Frankenmuth, Mich., a relatively small town, but the last two places he called home were large cities: Birmingham, Ala., and Knoxville, Tenn. Winslow has a typical type-A personality, that of a goal-oriented, impatient workaholic. He is also compulsive about attention to detail and sanitation — good qualities to have when running a microbrewery.

Winslow soon realized that to get any cooperation from residents, he was going to have to deal with them on their own terms. That meant slowing his pace, at times taking an indirect approach to reaching his goals, and getting to know his fellow workers better. “When you are running a brewery, sometimes there are not enough hours in a day, and the hardest thing for me to do is to force myself to slow down,” Winslow says. “In Lynchburg saying ‘Good morning’ isn’t enough; you have to ask them, ‘How’s the family?’”

Winslow and his wife have adjusted to the change of pace. He enjoys playing the banjo and keeps one at the brewery. He can be seen on occasion sitting on the loading dock with his banjo on his knee. The couple live on a farm some 20 miles out in the country. They spend many hours sitting on their porch watching their cattle.

There are many more differences between making Jack Daniel’s whiskey and Jack Daniel’s beer than there are similarities. Both are made from the same water, but this is where the similarity stops. The whiskey is made primarily from adjuncts, such as corn and unmalted rye. Malted barley is also used because its enzymes help the conversion of starches to sugars during the mashing process.

The beer is made exclusively from malted barley. Beer solids are mashed in one vessel, then the boil occurs in another with the solids removed. Whiskey, on the other hand, is mashed and boiled in the same vessel, and the solids are left in. The whiskey is boiled only momentarily, whereas the beer is boiled for more than an hour. “(Distillers) can knock off a batch of whiskey in two hours, whereas it takes us eight,” Winslow says.

Next in the whiskey-making process, the grains are pumped directly into the fermenter, solids and all. In brewing only liquid goes in. Another major difference is Jack Daniel allows the whiskey to sour and even adds a lactobacillus culture to ensure that this takes place. This would be unthinkable in almost any American brewery; only Belgian breweries and breweries making Berliner-style beer are eccentric enough to do this on a regular basis. Also, the distillery uses a fresh yeast culture for each batch, whereas the brewery harvests its yeast and repitches it in later batches.

Both products are filtered but by different methods: the beer with a diatomaceous earth filter and the whiskey through a 10-foot-deep
charcoal filter.

Jack Daniel’s whiskey ages for at least five years, whereas its lagers age 28 days, about two weeks longer than ale. The 28 days of aging account for its slogan, “Slow Brewed.” Whiskey, on the other hand, takes years to blend and mellow its flavors. Beer, of course, begins to deteriorate much more quickly.

This leads us to the most important difference in the process, distillation. Winslow says that the high alcohol level created through distillation eliminates any potential bacterial problems. Beer, on the other hand, is not distilled and is prone to spoilage. In a brewery bacteria count is critical. Winslow is particularly obsessed with bacteria because Jack Daniel’s beers are particularly subdued in flavor. This means that any bacterial taint would be readily apparent.

Winslow says many microbreweries are hit-or-miss on their quality control due to lack of proper packaging and testing equipment, lack of knowledge, or both. Improper packaging and testing leads to short shelf life and spoilage. The air levels in bottles are crucial to beer stability, and the air levels coming from many microbreweries are way too high, Winslow says. For this reason Jack Daniel has improved the specifications on the bottling line in order to reduce air levels.

With increased competition in the microbrewery business there is little room for mistakes, unlike during the early days, Winslow says.

Despite all the talk about consistency and quality control, Jack Daniel’s beers are not “robust” by any stretch of the imagination. “Delicate” is what some would say; “bland” is what many homebrewers would call it. It is odd that the maker of a whiskey with so much character would make a beer that doesn’t knock your socks off.

Brewmaster John Barrett took a stroke at solving this dilemma. He  combined some of the character of the whiskey with all of the Jack Daniel’s beers — Jack Daniel’s 1866 Classic Oak-Aged Pilsner, 1866 Classic Oak-Aged Amber Lager, and 1866 Classic Oak-Aged American Ale. The key, as you might have guessed, is “oak aged.”

Barrett developed a process by which some of the character of the whiskey is imparted in the beer. The whiskey itself, of course, can’t be put in the beer, but the oak flavor can. Old Jack Daniel’s whiskey barrels are shredded and then baked to make sure all the alcohol is removed and microorganisms killed. The shredded oak is then put in the aging tanks with the beer. The flavor is subtle, but if you try one of the beers, you might notice the Jack Daniel’s character.

You can purchase Jack Daniel’s beers in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.

If you’re in Tennessee, make the trip to Lynchburg — it’s about halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga — to tour the brewery and distillery. Next to the brewery is a museum with some nice 19th- and early 20th-century beer advertising items, such as trays, bottles, posters, and photographs.

Steve Johnson lives in Clemson, S.C., and is the author of three brewery guidebooks: On Tap: a Field Guide to North American Brewpubs and Craft Breweries, On Tap New England, and On Tap Northern California.