Tag: Whiskey

The enslaved man who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey

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Taken from this article, published in 2016:

Every year, about 275,000 people tour the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, and as they stroll through its brick buildings nestled in a tree-shaded hollow, they hear a story like this: In the 1850s, when Daniel was a boy, he went to work for a preacher, grocer and distiller named Dan Call. The preacher was a busy man, and when he saw promise in young Jack, he taught him how to run his whiskey still — and the rest is history.

This year is the 150th (sic) anniversary of Jack Daniel’s, and the distillery, home to one of the world’s best-selling whiskeys, is using the occasion to tell a different, more complicated tale. Daniel, the company now says, didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call, but from a man named Nearis Green, one of Call’s slaves.

See also: the history of mint julep and black bartenders and a very brief history of Jamaican rum

(via TWBE)

Rick Deckard's whiskey glass

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Rick Deckard's whiskey glass

If you bought that Star Wars stormtrooper decanter I wrote about a few years ago, now’s a good time to use it in honour of Harrison Ford. Why? Because Deckard’s whisky glass now exists.

Rob Beschizza from Boing Boing told a story of a 2002 blog post from Phil Steinschneider, a props guy and graphic designer (he created the Blade Runner font amongst other things), who discovered that the glassmaker behind Rick Deckard’s whiskey glass from Blade Runner was still making them.

In 2002, a very good friend in Los Angeles was able to definitively identify the exact glass used by the Blade Runner production. Subsequently, we located the original manufacturer in Europe in the hopes that the glass was still being made. Fortunately—although first introduced in 1972 by a boutique glassmaker based on a design by an internationally-known designer—the glass is produced to this day; a testament to its timelessness.

Over the years we have established a close relationship with Arnolfo di Cambio, and are making the same glass chosen by Ridley Scott and his set dressers—the Cini Boeri-designed “Cibi” double old-fashion tumbler (Cibi DOF, for short)—available to the general public. 

I love that:

  1. Beschizza found this post by chance
  2. That it was still live after all this time with the same design
  3. That the glass is still available to buy

And now I must buy it. So head to Amazon UK for the single glass, the twin glass set, or Amazon US for the twin set.