Gettin' Jacked

Randy Piper dips his head into a fermenter the size of an aboveground swimming pool and inhales deeply. The sour mash that bubbles like lava inside—a slushy mix of corn, rye, barley malt and water—looks a lot like cornbread batter. But it reeks of beer and vomit, much like the soggy carpet of a frat-house basement.

Still, Piper emerges with a smile. “God, that’s beautiful,” he says. “Take a whiff.”

On a good morning, Piper swears he can smell the sour mash from his home up on the hill as it wafts in on a cool breeze from the Jack Daniel’s Distillery. With his slicked-back hair, black button-down shirts, pointy-toed boots and mirrored sunglasses, he doesn’t seem like much of a down-home country boy. But this man loves his Tennessee sippin’ whiskey.

As he trudges through the distillery grounds, a tree-lined slice of heaven just outside of Lynchburg, he talks over the tour guide to explain the process that separates Tennessee whiskey from plain old bourbon. He peers deeply into a vat with a 10-foot-deep layer of sugar maple charcoal, which the whiskey seeps through, drip by drip, to mellow.

Without warning, he lifts the lid and flutters it violently to release the fumes from a 140-proof whiskey that will take about 10 days to mellow to the 110-proof liquor store variety. Piper wouldn’t dream of traipsing down the metal steps and out of the old building without letting that potent liquor burn his nostrils just a little.

Piper gets a little giddy around the stills. From the spring that produces the cool, pure water that is the root of the famous liquor, to the blackened trees surrounding the distillery, this is the source from which his passion flows, well, like whiskey.

That whiskey—and more importantly, the history, legend and lore behind it—have consumed his life for the better part of a decade. He points to the soot-colored trees around him, the ones that sway like drunken men in the wind, and explains that they’re blackened from base to branch because the whiskey fumes cause them to mold. Piper says that, in the old days, agents would look to such trees to help them suss out moonshiners cooking up batches of white liquor in beat-down barns in the Tennessee backwoods, where whiskey flowed from the foothills—cheap, powerful and unlawful.

For the last six years, he’s committed such facts to memory, not to mention collected Jack Daniel’s memorabilia like a man possessed. When he bought two souvenir shops from a local a few years back, he acquired the beginnings of a stellar collection of Jack bottles.

He’s amassed quite a bit more since then—some say the largest collection of bottles and trinkets in the world—but he’ll only admit to having the most museum-worthy mess of items in Tennessee. With boxes, shelves and display cases brimming with special-etched glasses, corkscrews, cardboard cutouts of the men who have served as master distillers, bottles of decades-old whiskey and on and on, Piper has become quite the celebrity around these parts.

He gained even more notoriety last fall. In October, a team of sheriff’s officers and agents from the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Commission (ABC) swooped in on a stunned Piper, who sat on a stool greeting customers in one of the two cramped souvenir shops he runs in Lynchburg’s sleepy town square.

Piper doesn’t know if agents were expecting some sort of speakeasy raid that hearkened back to Prohibition and the Al Capone days in Chicago. But he does know what they found: 2,400 bottles of collectors’ whiskey spread out on display shelves that hung above T-shirts and other piddling souvenirs at the two shops, and a whole mess of boxed bottles gathering dust in a handful of storage units around town. In the course of a few hours, he says they confiscated nearly $600,000 worth of his collection.

Piper is no Capone. Nor is he a backwoods moonshiner selling homebrews out of the back of a pickup truck. He’s a plumber from Goodlettsville, a simple man with a passion for Jack Daniel’s—a love of whiskey so deep that the mere thought of someone taking a swig from one his decades-old bottles makes him sick. He doesn’t collect them for the drinking. He doesn’t sell and trade them for the drinking either.

Piper will tell you what any collector would: Whether it’s a Barbie or a bottle of Jack, if you don’t take it out of the box, if you don’t break the seal or ditch the original carton, it’s worth more. And like any other collectors, folks like Piper buy, sell and trade bottles because they’re on one simple quest, and that’s to acquire more and more.

But to the ABC, Piper’s just another common criminal. He’s a modern-day bootlegger selling liquor without a license, and there’s nothing that’s going to change their minds about it. He’s not the first Tennessee collector to unwittingly go the way of the red-handed moonshiner, and he certainly won’t be the last. Such confiscations are very lucrative for the ABC because if they have their way—and they usually do—they’ll own (and, of course, sell and profit from) the collection before the case even hits court. Just ask Piper, who has been dragged through the media mire and painted as a criminal only to have the ABC turn tail and offer him a deal to call the whole thing off—after they make some money off his collection. Monetary incentive aside, the whole damn thing doesn’t make much sense, especially to Piper. “Everybody’s first reaction [to my story], without exception, is, ‘Haven’t they got better things to do than this?’ And I don’t know.”