Great whiskey takes time — time to grow the oak trees for the barrel, time for the corn and other grains to grow and be harvested, time to distill and years in the barrel to change from clear distillate to the sweet, brown elixir we call Tennessee whiskey in these parts.
For distiller Allisa Henley, the journey to her latest chapter of whiskey making has indeed been long and filled with a few bumps and sad events along the way. I first met Allisa more than a decade ago when she ran the visitor experience at George Dickel Distillery in Tullahoma, and on some bad days, I still go to Cascade Hollow in my mind and picture that beautiful babbling brook that feeds the still at Dickel.
When Dickel’s master distiller John Lunn left in 2014, Allisa succeeded him at the helm of the operation. She later followed Lunn to Avery’s Trail in Newport, Tenn. Not long after that, spirits giant Sazerac purchased the Avery’s Trail facility and acquired two pretty talented distillers as part of the sale. The idea was always that Lunn and Henley would be instrumental in helping Sazerac add a true Tennessee whiskey product to their portfolio, which already included Buffalo Trace products and other distilleries around the globe.
Another part of the idea was that the duo would work out of a brand-new production facility on 55 acres that Sazerac purchased in Murfreesboro, but that plan has been NIMBY'd into a permanent hold status with hopes to develop the site in the future. Rather than wait for issues between the company and its neighbors to be ironed out, Sazerac moved a little bit closer to Nashville on Interstate 24 and built out a new facility in La Vergne at 4000 Centrepoint Drive.
Sadly, Lunn passed away in 2023 before the early whiskeys that he and Henley had collaborated on at Avery’s Trail were ready for release. To honor his legacy and mark the connection that Allisa and John had while working together, the new distillery will be named AJ Bond Distillery. Not only does that name speak to the bond between the distillers, it’s also just an objectively badass name for a whiskey!
The first Tennessee whiskey from AJ Bond will hit the markets sometime this summer after years of development, including a dozen years when Lunn and Henley worked together at Dickel before their final venture together under Sazerac. I really look forward to sampling the fruits of all that hard work sometime soon!
