Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780471273929

Table of Contents

Reviews

The author traces the Daniel family lineage from Scotland and Ireland to rural Tennessee, and Jasper “Jack” Newton Daniel’s rise from hardscrabble youth to a dandy gent with a love of horses, fine clothes and women, a colleague of J.P. Morgan’s and one of the most famous spirits producers in the world. Orphaned at 15, Jack discovered a whiskey still on the property of his longtime neighbor and new guardian, Dan Call, and his interest in distilling booze was born. Krass (Carnegie) details the early business partnership between Call and Daniel and their eventual split, as Call forces himself to choose between preaching and making whiskey. “One Call [descendant] wished he’d given up preaching instead because the Jack Daniel Distillery was eventually worth tens of millions of dollars,” Krass writes. While Krass’s research is ample, the book often gets bogged down in historical minutiae, and at times the reader wishes for a more charismatic star of the show than the somewhat dour Daniel. But witnessing the maturation of his namesake company—not to mention the maturation of the U.S. as it confronts slavery, the Civil War and the temperance movement—is engrossing. Fans of the whiskey will be happy to hear the alleged real story behind the Old No. 7 that adorns each bottle, and anyone can appreciate the classic American characters sprinkled throughout the text, including the richly monikered Eph Grizzard, Beauregard Beam and Lemuel Motlow. Agent, Ed Knappman. (May) (Publishers Weekly, April 12th, 2004)

...the book is engrossing (Publishers Weekly, April 12th, 2004)

Author Information

PETER KRASS is the author of Carnegie (Wiley), cited by Barron's as the ""definitive"" biography and selected by Library Journal as one of the best biography/business books of 2002. His other books include The Book of Business Wisdom, The Book of Leadership Wisdom, and The Book of Investing Wisdom, all available from Wiley.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available