Around the Barrel - Transcript Ep019 Jeff Arnett
Jeff Arnett: More importantly, we feel like we should be a good citizen. You want to be able to look your community members in the eye and feel like you're doing your very best by them.
Lucas Hendrickson: So many buzzwords come into play when talking about modern day manufacturing, especially when it comes to the idea of sustainability. But for those who work in and around the Jack Daniel Distillery, they reframe that idea into a much larger, more time honored tradition: stewardship.
On this episode, we talk with Jack Daniel's Master Distiller Jeff Arnett about the sustainability efforts the company has made not just in the last few years, but reaching back into the last century. He sheds light on some of the things you have to do when 300 thousand people visit your home each year, and he shares the Distillery's vision for working towards zero waste Around the Barrel.
Welcome back to Around the Barrel, the official podcast from the makers of Jack Daniel's. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrickson. It's probably impossible to calculate the number of decisions Master Distiller Jeff Arnett has to make of a day. There's a lot of little moves that have to be made every single day when you're producing the most popular Tennessee whiskey in the world, but you have to keep your eyes trained on the future as well.
And that includes trying to figure out how to keep the environment in and around where that whiskey is made viable, both for the present and the long-term future. We talked with Jeff about the moves the company has made over the past 40 years to sustain the Distillery's tiny corner of Middle Tennessee and how most of his own thinking on that subject comes from lessons learned a long time ago from mom.
Jeff: Hello, my name is Jeff Arnett and I'm the Master Distiller for the Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee.
Lucas: Jeff Arnett, welcome back to Around the Barrel.
Jeff: Thank you. It's good to be back. It's been a while.
Lucas: Yeah, it has been a little while. We've talked to a bunch of folks, but we needed to get back to you and see how things are going. This is a very important side of 21st century manufacturing, I think. There's this idea of sustainability – this idea of being a good citizen of where you are located not only of the region, but the state, the nation, that kind of stuff.
Jack Daniels has certainly led the way in trying to figure out what that looks like in this century. What kinds of things have you seen as you've been a big part of this company, especially in the idea of things you weren't able to do before 2019?
Jeff: Clearly, over the last decade, almost every brand has felt some pressure to be accountable for how their products are made – sustainability, not being wasteful and things of that nature – not being a polluter. I think that's fantastic. The good news for Jack Daniel's is we didn't start this ten years ago. Most of what we do here began probably closer to 40 years ago.
My standard response is sometimes things happen because necessity is the mother of invention. We're here in Lynchburg, Tennessee. We're in a town of a few hundred people. We have a small local electrical co-op that gives us power. We have a small water department that provides clean drinking water to our community, but we don't have the large municipal group that's going to be able to deal with a tremendous amount of trash from us, disruptions or upsets to the community.
Plus, most of our employees live here. My home was about two miles downstream of the Distillery here and literally on the same water system where the cave spring dumps out into Mulberry Creek. It winds around town and out towards the Elk River. I let my kids swim in that. We fished in it. That's how confident I was in what we’re doing here at the Distillery.
I say it's good if you're providing good paying jobs. We're proud of our track record there, that Jack Daniel's has grown, which has meant good jobs and good benefits for people. More importantly, we feel like we should be a good citizen. You want to be able to look your community members in the eye and feel like you're doing your very best by them.
It means not being a polluter of water, air, land or soil. As a brand, we're dependent upon all those things. We need clean air to breathe as human beings. We need a good water source, and we are very fortunate to have one that feeds the Distillery. We need a good ground where our crops are going to be grown. We're very much tied to the environment and the soil as an all natural product.
I've never described myself as being a tree hugger. I kind of laugh when I throw that term around, but I'm a strong believer in stewardship and that we need to not be wasteful. I'm not somebody who would protest a tree being cut down, but if you're going to cut a tree down, make sure you get the maximum benefit. Don't be wasteful with it. That underlies, at least, my own personal philosophy and I think it meshes very well with how Jack Daniel's sees the world and wants to operate as a brand.
I've always been a huge fan of Jack Daniel's. I was a Tennessee Squire so I came from the fan club. I loved the product, loved the story and loved the people of Lynchburg who helped me make it. I absolutely believe in the company's mission to try to be a good environmental role model to other companies.
Lucas: Well, the phrase that has been used many times as we've done this show is "from grain to glass." That includes the harvesting of trees for making barrels, but also, I'm assuming, the replanting of trees to be able to keep that cycle going, of being able to have a quality product going into that quality product barrel and then coming out the same way.
Jeff: We do. There are two specific species of wood that we use and that's the American white oak and the hard sugar maple. We use one to make charcoal. That's the hard sugar maple. Then we use the American white oak to make barrels. Of course, we're a barrel maker too.
That's probably one of the questions that I get asked a lot when I'm out talking about our process. People want to know, "Do you own the land where your wood is grown? How much control do you exert over that part of the process?"
We have nine log buyers, but we begin as a purchaser of woods. We don't own the land where it's grown, but I feel like you can at least exert a little bit of push with some of these groups. So, we don't own the land where our woods come from, but we are concerned about what I would call "healthy replanting."
The University of Tennessee has a fantastic wood science department where they are into forestry and things of that nature. Back in 1998, we had partnered with them looking at the hard sugar maple and the white oak varieties. We had about a 30 acre plot of land, which we were looking to do other things with, but we said, "Hey, this might be a good investment of that land."
So, we turned it over to the University of Tennessee and they came in and set up planting rows for those two species of trees. That has largely come to fruition. It's gotten to a point of maturity where they can start collecting seeds and acorns and things of that nature.
Those have proven out on our ground that they're going to be disease resistant, that they're going to be drought resistant and that they're going to be good hardy specimens of those two trees.
If people are cutting down white oak, it's their prerogative. They may put pine back in its place because we run a free society, but you want to encourage them and say, "Hey, it's going to be longer to maturity, but if you want to make the investment, to plant for your grandkids, just know that we'll be here. We've been around 150 years. It may take 60 years or so to grow a white oak tree to full maturity where we can make a barrel out of it, but we would be back to purchase it and it's a high value wood.”
Lucas: Anybody who's visited Lynchburg and taken the tour knows how important that cave spring is. What kind of things have been done over the years to protect that water source? Has anything new been added to that process as well?
Jeff: We can crawl up inside the cave spring. There's two major trunk lines or branches that feed it. We can go up inside it about a mile, which shows where the main reservoir trunk lines are. We did this back in the early eighties and that helped us identify what we thought was the major what we would call “recharge area.” This is not an aquifer. This is actually true spring water. Springs tend to pop up and run across the ground and then drop back down underground and it's hard to trace them for that reason.
There was a large farm that covered the top of our cave spring and we didn't own it at the time, but the family who did own the property was interested in selling it. We bought about a 250 acre track. We have almost 3000 acres of land, but 250 acres of it were literally purchased just to protect the quality of the water here.
We knew there were sinkholes on it with the rain and runoffs. Of course, it's going to filter through a good portion of soil and rock. There's a lot of limestone in the soil here, which serves to purify the water as it enters. The water stays underground long enough that it gets to what I call "ground temperature," which is 56 degrees Fahrenheit, so the water doesn't change temperature much from winter to summer.
Clearly, we wanted to be able to protect the water as best we can. It's very complicated to attract spring water as I was saying.
We can look at other water sources that pop up inside this county that are in the right location at the right elevations to ultimately, through gravity, feed into our water, but the only way to trace them is actually to put fluorescent dyes into the water. Then you get inside the cave with a black light and see if you can watch it flow in to trace it.
This is drinking water for a lot of our community. Of course we have a municipal water system, but a lot of people are drinking spring water here. That's not a good way to be neighborly, to go and start throwing glow in the dark chemicals in their drinking water.
But we're satisfied that we've done everything we can practically do to protect the water system here, and it's something we're always concerned about. We're fortunate, too, that the water flows very abundantly here. I'm convinced that that's what brought Jack to this location years ago, was the was cold, mineral rich and iron free water that flowed abundantly enough that he didn't have to worry about water supply.
We had a couple of drought years a few years ago. It made us a little bit concerned. We were never at a point where we didn't have enough water to make whiskey, but we were a little bit closer than we had been in the past, so we ended up building a water tank above town. We're constantly sitting on about 10 million gallons of cave spring water.
We want to take good care of the water and, once again, be a good steward of it. Just the work that we've done over the last 15 or 20 years at the Distillery has resulted in saving about 30 million gallons of cave spring water from us even needing it. That has been done largely in the way of what we call "thickening up beers."
The biggest water user that we have inside of our processes is fermentation. That's where you're taking roughly about 40 thousand gallons of water and you put in about 1700 bushels of grain. You're not making whiskey from water, per say. The actual source of the nutrients that will produce your whiskey is the grain. The more grain you can put in, or the less water you can put in for the same amount of grain is making you more efficient. We call that "running a thicker beer" or a "lower beer gallonage."
We have worked over the years to try to make a more efficient process there, and the collective work that we've done over a year's production saves us roughly 30 million gallons of cave spring water.
It's water we don't have to put into the system and, therefore, we don't have to take it out because there's a lot of efficiencies as far as water conservation. That includes not having to run utilities to dry that water back out and different things that are required to get it out of your spent grain stream. Clearly, we're looking at every part of our operation and over time, as technology has gotten better, trying to take advantage of that.
Lucas: You talk about that grain bill, which is world famous, obviously, and is a core of what makes Jack. I've always been fascinated by where that grain goes after you're done using it for whichever product. Talk about that process of taking that spent grain and turning it into something that's next generation useful.
Jeff: We use three grains to make Jack Daniel's. We use corn, malted barley and rye, and we have different percentages based on whether or not we're making our Old No. 7 recipe or a new rye recipe. What we take from the grain are the starches and sugars. We're taking the carbohydrates out of it, if you will. That's the portion that becomes ultimately distilled in the alcohol.
We ferment it into a distiller's beer. Then we distill the beer into a distal that’s a new whiskey or a new make like White Dog. There's a lot different names for it. What's left over in the grain is largely protein and there's a little bit of fat and fiber content.
It's very valuable when you look at a farmer who's not really looking to fatten up a cow but wants to beef it up – not put the white stuff on it, but put the red stuff on it. This is an ideal food source simply because it's very protein rich, like the Atkins diet. There's not a lot of sugars or carbohydrates in there. You can put two to three pounds of lean weight on a cow a day if you're feeding them distillage, so that's ultimately what happens.
We have an effective footprint of probably about 25 or 30 miles around the Distillery where farmers can drive in with tankers and take it as direct or whole stillage from the Distillery. Let it cool off a little bit. Feed your cows a little bit of hay but let this be their primary food source.
That’s the "sub-economy," I call it, of Moore County, where we're located. We're the second smallest county in the state of Tennessee. I think we still rank as the number one beef cattle producing county in the state of Tennessee, and that is largely because of the Distillery being here.
A big portion of it is fed directly out to local farmers. We do dry some of it. We have a byproduct called distiller's dry grain, and once you do that, you can concentrate its value down a little bit. It makes it a little bit more transportable so we can take it by trucks and get it in to a train terminal. We can ship it to local co-ops. It's largely consumed by the farmer's co-ops in Tennessee and Alabama.
Lucas: Give me a rough estimate of how much grain you're using across the course of a year.
Jeff: In a typical year we're going to buy about 8 million bushels, upwards of nine. Something in that range. We're 80 percent corn in the bulk of what we produce so you're looking at roughly 8 million bushels of corn and then another million bushels of malted barley and rye.
Lucas: How much of that roughly would you say does get run through that process and then repurposed that way?
Jeff: Once we have taken all the starches and sugars out of the grain, depleted that through fermentation and distilled that into whiskey, we'll take a portion of the liquid that's left over in that fermenter and we'll recycle it back in – that’s part of water conservation.
It's also part of the sour mashing process. It does a PH adjustment for us, which actually makes for a more consistent fermentation environment. That helps to concentrate the solids up in the liquid stream that will be fed out to local farmers. About two thirds of the total byproduct of grain that we produce here is going to be fed within about a 25 or 30 mile radius to local farmers and fed as direct or whole stillage.
Beyond that, we can run a centrifuge and make a syrup, which is a small volume. If we remove the water from it and get it from 10 percent solids up to about 95 percent solids, with a very small moisture content, then that's called a "distiller's dry grain." That gets fed to the Tennessee and Alabama farmers co-ops through trucks and trainloads.
Lucas: What kind of recycling do you do as part of the packaging of the product?
Jeff: If I just look at our overall operation here, we do have ambitions to be a zero waste facility. We are not quite there yet, but we're pretty low. We're not just less than 1 percent, we're less than two tenths of 1 percent. That has been, like I said, not just a decade worth of work, but more like about four decades worth of work. If you measure the weight of what enters the property and what leaves us as trash for landfill, it's a pretty small percentage.
The biggest challenges we have are our employees and what they bring on the property. They put in trash cans what 300 thousand tourists who come to the business leave behind, but nothing goes to waste here. We've done all this work to conserve water from the cave spring. The sour mashing process actually has a conservatory effect on how much water we need because it offsets fresh water usage. All the grains are going to get fed either as wet or as distiller dry grains to the farmers.
Even the charcoal. As a Tennessee whiskey, we do one step different than bourbon does. We burn hard sugar maple into charcoal here. We grind it. We compact it in a vat and we slowly drip through it. It has a set life to it. That means that we're tasting every vat. We're nosing and tasting it each week and we're determining what point is appropriate to change it.
Even that gets repurposed and recycled. If you see smoking pellets or briquettes from Jack Daniel's, they're sold under a licensing agreement. That stuff ultimately gets burned up in people's home grills. If we can't sell it, if there's not enough demand for it that way, we're also buying wood waste from local sawmills.
Even from our own cooperage in Alabama, it's close enough that we can take any waste that was generated while they were making staves and heading material. We can bring it here and we can use it because it's a good hard wood. We can burn it to generate steam to run our still columns here. We use a little bit of a natural gas. Historically, we've tried to rely as much on burning wood as we can.
When you burn wood to generate steam through a boiler, you generate another byproduct, which is potash. We're helping to avoid this wood getting into a landfill by burning it up for its BTU value, but even the potash has value. You have to have a way to handle that out of the boiler – to remove it.
It serves just like lime. Anybody who's had a garden before, if you go out and test the soil over time, soil gets acidic and that actually hinders your ability to grow crops in it. So, we can use potash. You can dust a field with it here. If you're tilling it up, just kind of dust it with a little bit of potash and it'll help neutralize the PH of the soil and you'll pretty much get a bumper crop. It becomes a high value thing.
If you look at all these things, we're working in harmony with Mother Nature here as best we can. It's offsetting landfill. It's reducing our carbon footprint – all of these things that are good for us.
We can only use our barrels one time. We make them for ourselves. Those get resold to local craftspeople who will turn them into furniture and all kinds of wonderful things that people love to buy at the local store here. The biggest consumer of them is going to be the Scotch and Irish whiskey industry. A lot of craft beer people have gotten into a barrel aged stouts and things of that nature.
As a larger distiller, we generate a lot of these barrels, so we have somebody who works that market and tries to get us scattered out. Because markets come and go, we try to have a pretty diverse customer base, but none of that stuff's going to go to waste. A big portion of what we do here is using the barrel but also finding a good home for it for the long haul.
Once you get out into our processing and bottling operations, the typical bottle has about 30 percent recycled content to it. The more clear a glass bottle has to be, the less you're able to bring in to recycle. The bottles with the black label tend to be made through, not to get too technical, a narrow neck press and blow process so it doesn't have super thick glass to it. Therefore, you can handle a little bit of tinting.
So, if there's a grayish to greenish to brownish undertint that happened in glass, it won't really show up and make the bottle look dirty. That's what you don't want. You want the bottle to look clear to the eye before you fill it.
If we go into bottles that are super thick bottles, like our 27 Gold or Sinatra that have enough glass in the base alone to make three bottles, then it becomes more and more important that you use an ultra pure sand source; that if you are using any recycle in it that it's internal recycle, so you're just looking at what you're molding in house; and with bottles that have flaws, you just crush those and put them back in.
We're fortunate that with the black label bottle, we're able to get about 30 percent recycled content in. Of course we try to make the bottles as durable as possible, but if a bottle breaks in house on us, it’s taken to recycle companies.
We do a pretty good job of recycling everything. The cases that our bottles come in go all the way from the glass manufacturer to the store. We basically take empty bottles out of those boxes. We fill them. We put labels, caps and shrink seals on them and we put them right back into the boxes so that there's no scrap being generated there.
When these pallets come in, there'll be a pallet with a bunch of bottles turned upside down inside the case as they have stretch wrap to stop them from shifting and falling over. We purchased a baler and we take that plastic wrap clean. We were able to find a partner to take that.
It largely goes to the Trex decking product. The way Trex decking is produced is they'll take sawdust and other waste products from other sawmills, they'll use plastic and they'll mold it into something that's a competing product for pressure treated wood. It lasts about six times as long as pressure treated wood. Even pressure treated wood has its limitations.
If you go down to the coast and start walking out on these piers, these Trex decking things are pretty nice because you won't get any splinters from it and things like that. It's a little bit more of an expensive product, but it's a great product and lasts a really, really long time.
So, if you look at almost everything that we do here, we have been fortunate to be able to find someone who had some value for it. I think that's the key thing. You're running a business and you want to do all the things that you can afford to do that are right to do, but within the limitations of what's there.
What we have found is there are things we looked at that ten years ago, we felt like weren't going to be smart. It didn't make any practical sense to do it. The cost outweighed any benefit we could achieve from it.
But the technology is constantly changing, too, so trying to make commitments, trying to think outside the box – I think that's going to be an ongoing thing for Jack Daniel's as we go. We're in a good spot right now, but that doesn't mean we can't be better tomorrow.
That was sort of Jack's guiding words. "Everyday you make it, you’ll make it the best you can." I'll have a look at that saying. It's on the wall in Jack's old office.
To me, there are some things that should never change about Jack Daniel's. There are some sacred cows and things that we shouldn't do. The main thing is we shouldn't knowingly compromise and make a cheaper product. That's not to say that they're not efficiencies. If you can make the same product and not be wasteful then you need to do that.
To me it's that you shouldn't be bound by the technologies of yesterday. I've told people I take that as license from Jack himself to say, "Hey, if there's a way to make a better product tomorrow, you owe it to me to try."
I don't feel limited to the technologies of 1866 because that's when Jack was starting the business, not from the standpoint of making the product or in how we run the operation and try to run it more efficiently, greener, and more sustainable over time.
It's been, like I said, a 40 year process for Jack Daniel's, but it's also something that's very near and dear to our owning family. The Brown family out of Louisville, Kentucky has a great track record of not just saying the right things, but putting their money where their mouth is and making significant investments to run clean operations.
Lucas: That's a company with a century and a half of history. There could be this opportunity for sustainability to just be a buzzword, but you do have to have that commitment not only from the top down, but from the bottom up to be able to sustain your efforts of sustainability, for lack of a better term.
Jeff: I wasn't always as fortunate as I am now to work for a company like Jack Daniel's. I worked for another company. It was a very reputable company, but I think there was a lot of lip service given to certain things that were what I call "industry buzzwords" and you had to posture yourself a certain way.
What I have seen here is what we say is what we mean. I give Jack Daniel's a lot of credit for being very transparent in how it operates itself as a brand, that we don't pretend to be something that we're not.
I also see that from the family that controls us. They're not telling us the environment is important and then not supporting us. We come to them and say, "Hey, there's an investment we would have to make, but we can move the needle in the positive direction here. We can be greener, we can be more efficient, we can remove some waste streams, but we're going to have to roll the dice in some cases."
There's a little bit of risk anytime you spend money on new technology, but they have shown that they mean what they say. They're very supportive and they always hear us out when we're coming and looking at making investments in the Distillery that are directionally better for the environment.
Lucas: You have to want to do it. You have to want to be able to make the effort not only from a production standpoint, but from a visitor and guest standpoint. A lot of people tend to think that sustainability efforts just mean eventually those price hikes are going to be passed along to the customer. How can those efforts save both the company and the consumer money in the long run?
Jeff: We've made some investments up front in these things, but I don't know that we're adding to the underlying cost of Jack Daniel's simply because we're trying to be good stewards and be responsible with what we're doing here.
A lot of times these things like putting a baler in, separating some materials that we have and finding a customer who will take it saves us because we're not going to have to pay to have it hauled away, as far as trash weight goes.
They might not be giving us much for it, but at least it's saving us from having to pay to haul it away. Sometimes what you gain is that you're not necessarily getting paid back for it, but you're avoiding additional expenses and clearly that's a win.
There's this whole cradle to the grave mentality. You don't want your stuff leaving here just because somebody is willing to take it from you. You kind of worry about what they're going to do with it at the same time.
If we have spent oil coming out of gearboxes and things of that nature and we're going to give that to a company, that's hopefully a reputable person who's going to take all of our spent oil and go do something with it. We don't want them driving around the corner and just dumping it in a field. You hear horror stories of stuff like that. You're trying to find people that are reputable, that have the right recycling capabilities and things of that nature.
We're having this conversation about necessity being the mother of invention. Being in a small community, we didn't have a lot of support systems for us. If you understand that whatever messes you make, you're going to have to clean them up yourself, then I always say you get smart about it. Probably the best thing my mom ever did for me was quit cleaning up my room. I didn't go to school and magically come back and everything was in its place.
She said that she was amazed because when I went away to college, she thought I was going to live in squalor. The first time she came to my apartment, it was neat as a pin and it was because that was the expectation I had. I realized that I had to do it. I think that's the kind of philosophy that we have here. We're not looking for somebody else to clean up our mess. We realize whatever we do is our responsibility.
If we can find a partner that will take those things and do something positive with them, that's great. That's a win. We are concerned about anything that leaves the property. We have a responsibility to its final resting spot.
That's a little bit more comprehensive of a view towards the environment and responsibility. Once again, I think what we've done here at the Distillery reflects that over the course of 40 years, we found quality partners. We found good customers to take things from us. We've created sub-economies.
If you're in Lynchburg and you don't work at the Distillery, there's not much else to do. You can sell the shirts and hats on the square and maybe serve a meal or two here or there, but there is a whole sub-economy of farming, agriculture. It's not the best crop ground. It's kind of rolling and rocky, but it grows hay.
It's beautiful pastoral land for cows to be raised on. We always say the best cows in the world come from here. They're marinated from the inside out because most of these farmers are taking stillage from us, are taking spent grains and it's a healthy, nutrient rich food source for them.
There's a lot of synergy and harmony with nature and the environment that we're in. We’re constantly looking for all the cogs that connect to one another, are they all turning in the right direction or are there opportunities to make it smoother for everyone?
Lucas: Fascinating stuff and you guys will continue to innovate as we go along. Jeff, again, thanks for your time. Thanks for joining us Around the Barrel.
Jeff: It's a pleasure. Thank you.
Lucas: Around the Barrel is the official podcast of the Jack Daniel Distillery. Follow the podcast on the web at jackdaniels.com/podcast. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate and review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you gather your on demand audio.
Always remember with great podcasts and great whiskey, please enjoy responsibly. Join us next time for more conversations Around the Barrel.
Your friends at Jack Daniel's remind you to drink responsibly. Jack Daniel's and Old No. 7 are registered trademarks. Copyright 2019, Jack Daniel's. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Distilled and bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around the Barrel is intended for listeners 21 years of age and older.
