Mr. Jack Daniels is famous for his sour mash whiskey the world afar. He originally set up the whiskey distillery in Tennessee in the mid 1800s. It would go on to become one of the best known whiskey distilleries in the world in just a few short decades. Jack was known to be an irate person who became even more so when he would sample his own whiskey, and quite often Jack was a drunken Jack.  He was a drunkard who shouted at his staff, and threw out batches of whiskey because they did not meet his stringent taste requirements.  One day his anger and drunkenness would ultimately be the cause of his demise.

Jack was never married and had no children, but he did take his nephew Lem Motlow under his shoulders and taught him the ins and the outs of the whiskey business. Lem was gifted at mathematics and ultimately he would head the financial and accounting operations of Jack’s distillery. Lem was the only person that Mr. Daniels trusted. In fact, around the year of 1907, Jack gave his whiskey distillery to Motlow as he was suffering from bad health, and later died in 1911 from blood poisoning.

This is where the story gets truly strange.  This story is told on nearly every tour to-date of this famous distillery in Tennessee. One morning Jack was coming in to work, as he did early every morning. When he forgot the combination to his recipe safe in his office (which he was known for doing often) he became agitated and kicked the safe. This caused him to break his toe. Later on the toe became infected, and that was what killed him in 1911: blood poisoning from an untreated, infected toe. The irony: if he had just soaked his toe in his own whiskey there would have never been any infection.

Jack Daniel’s Funny Story Relived
Chuck Chuckles, as he likes to be called, is an older fellow with some pretty fantastic stories that relate to Jack Daniel’s famous sour mash whiskey. As you can see (in the short yet funny video imbedded below) there are many different stories about this world famous highball. In this story, Chuck tells how his ancestors were kicked out of their Baptist church because they were making whiskey. This prompted them to relocate to Tennessee where they ultimately worked for the one and only Jack Daniel’s, before getting caught drinking the whiskey and being fired.