Who uses the Lincoln County Process?

Every Tennessee distiller selling a bottle labeled "Tennessee whiskey" uses it: Jack Daniel's, George Dickel, Nelson's Green Brier, Uncle Nearest, Collier and McKeel, Chattanooga Whiskey, and the rest of the state's licensed producers. One distillery, Benjamin Prichard's in Kelso, is named in the law itself as a written exception and skips the step entirely. Outside Tennessee, almost nobody runs the process, because it's tied to a label only Tennessee distillers can use. The reason a single distillery gets a personal exemption from a rule that binds every other Tennessee whiskey maker is one of the more telling stories in American whiskey law.

Which Tennessee Distilleries Actually Use It?

The list of current users is short and tracks pretty closely with the state's commercial distilling roster. Two producers dominate by volume; the rest are smaller operations that have come up in the past fifteen years.

• Jack Daniel's: the producer most associated with the process. Drips fresh spirit through ten feet of packed sugar-maple charcoal pellets before it enters the barrel.
• George Dickel: chills the spirit close to freezing first, then runs it through thirteen-foot vats packed with sugar-maple charcoal. The chilling step is unique to Dickel and is meant to slow the filtration.
• Nelson's Green Brier: the revived Greenbrier Distillery in Nashville, running the process on a scale closer to the smaller producers than to Daniel's.
• Uncle Nearest: named for Nathan "Nearest" Green, the formerly enslaved master distiller who taught Jack Daniel the technique. Filters through sugar-maple charcoal before barreling.
• Collier and McKeel: Nashville-based, leaning on the historical Tennessee method as a point of identity.
• Chattanooga Whiskey: east-Tennessee distiller producing both bourbon and Tennessee whiskey lines, applying the process only to the latter.

The mechanics vary a little (vat height, drip speed, whether the spirit is chilled), but the legal requirement is the same: the spirit has to pass through sugar-maple charcoal before it goes into the barrel.

Is Anyone Allowed to Skip It?

Yes. One distillery has a tailored carve-out, and any Tennessee distillery can skip the process if it gives up the label.

The carve-out belongs to Benjamin Prichard's, in Kelso, Tennessee. When the state codified the Lincoln County Process in 2013, Prichard's recipe predated the rule and the legislature wrote in an exemption naming Prichard's specifically. The exemption sits in the same statute (TN Code § 57-2-106) that defines the process. Prichard's bottles its product as Tennessee whiskey without filtering through charcoal.

The other path is open to anyone: a Tennessee distillery can make a corn-based, new-charred-oak-aged whiskey without the Lincoln County Process. They just can't call it Tennessee whiskey on the label. That whiskey would be a bourbon, or, if it falls short of bourbon's rules, a generic American whiskey. So the practical rule reads less like a mandate and more like a trade. Use the process and earn the category name. Skip it and use a different one.

Do Distilleries Outside Tennessee Use It?

Almost no one outside Tennessee runs the Lincoln County Process, and the reason is structural. The process exists in law only as a requirement for the "Tennessee whiskey" category, which is restricted to spirits made inside Tennessee. A distillery in Kentucky or Indiana that filters its bourbon through sugar-maple charcoal cannot use the words "Tennessee whiskey" on the label. The result is still a bourbon (or an American whiskey), which is what it would have been anyway. There's nothing to gain commercially.

A handful of craft distilleries elsewhere have experimented with charcoal mellowing as a flavor choice rather than a category claim. They tend to describe it as "charcoal-filtered bourbon" or just leave it off the label entirely. None of them are operating at a scale that registers next to the Tennessee producers.

A bourbon filtered through sugar-maple charcoal is still legally a bourbon and not a Tennessee whiskey, since the Tennessee whiskey category is gated by where the spirit is made, not by what it passes through.

Why Is It Required at All?

The process is older than the law that made it mandatory, but the law is what locked it in. The technique itself goes back to the early 1800s in middle Tennessee, where distillers, including the formerly enslaved Nathan "Nearest" Green and his student Jack Daniel, were filtering new spirit through hardwood charcoal before barrel aging. The county where the practice was associated, Lincoln County, gave the process its name.

For most of the next two centuries, charcoal mellowing was a regional habit, not a legal requirement. That changed in 2013, when the Tennessee legislature passed a bill that defined "Tennessee whiskey" in state law for the first time. The new statute (TN Code § 57-2-106) wrote the bourbon standard of identity into Tennessee law, added the geographic requirement that the spirit be made in Tennessee, and added charcoal filtration before aging. Without the 2013 rule, Tennessee whiskey was effectively a marketing term that the major producers happened to share.

The reason the legislature acted came down to category protection. Tennessee whiskey had a recognizable identity, but no legal definition meant anyone in Tennessee could ship a barrel-aged corn whiskey out of state under the same name. Codifying the process locked the category to a specific production step the major producers were already running.

There's a small irony in the name. The process is named for Lincoln County, Tennessee, where Jack Daniel's predecessor distillery sat in the 1860s. Six years later, the county lines were redrawn and the distillery ended up inside a newly carved-out Moore County, where Jack Daniel's still operates today. The county that gave the process its name no longer contains the distillery that made it famous, but the name stuck.