Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 1, We Drink Moonshine and Learn about Boy Meets World

For Matt's 45th birthday, I decided to take advantage of having two nearly grown teenagers who can drive themselves to school and work and cook their own meals and keep the house tidy and presumably handle any small emergency that arises, and leave them alone at home to do just that while Matt and I took ourselves on a quick little road trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee!

Okay, fine. I'm still seething with jealousy at the super fun trip Matt and Will took to Peru and I wanted to go on a super fun trip, too, but my children are too busy to go with me and the only way I could get Matt to take off work for yet another vacation was to tell him it was his birthday present. Ahem.

And I had an absolutely wonderful time, thank you very much! I leaned fully into the road trip aesthetic, with car snacks and 1,000 podcasts (we ended up binging Pod Meets World, because who doesn't love Topanga?). Matt drove the entire way, leaving me more time to peruse the handfuls of travel brochures that I gathered at every rest stop. I now have a collection of brochures for every tourable cave between here and Georgia, and one day I AM GOING TO SEE THEM ALL!

I missed the kids terribly, but I texted them photos of every cute dog and gas station novelty food I saw:

If the kids had been with me I'd definitely have gone for these.

We'd also have 100% bought ourselves $1 Slurpees. Instead, I bought myself a 59-cent soda and a bag of Sour Patch candies that was ALL CHERRIES!

It's a six-hour drive from here to Chattanooga, but there are a couple of interesting-looking distilleries about halfway there, and we enjoyed our last distillery tour so much that we picked one to stop at. 

Casey Jones Distillery offers a guided tour and a bourbon tasting, and we wisely did the bourbon tasting first so that we wouldn't be too tipsy to drive, although it did mean that we didn't know as much about what we wanted to taste as we would have if we'd done the tour first. But even without the full history lesson we'd get during the tour, I got a kick (both a "Kentucky hug" and a historical thrill!) out of tasting Casey's Cut, the original moonshine recipe that the original "Casey" Jones developed when he was a moonshiner hiding out from the revenuers. Matt really liked this one, and that's actually what we ended up buying a bottle of. 

Casey Jones Distillery is a LOT smaller than Member's Mark, so it was interesting to see the contrasts during our guided tour. The history of how the two companies developed is also completely different, and although I had been interested in hearing about the scientific process of choosing the perfect grain combination, I was flat-out fascinated hearing about the history of illegal moonshine production in rural Kentucky. I'm amazed that economically and educationally disenfranchised people could have figured out the chemical and mechanical requirements to create stills from scratch, with no blueprints or written instructions, but Matt noted that many Kentuckians had emigrated from Scotland, with its own history of whisky, so possibly there was some word-of-mouth instruction or even memories of that process. In the 1600s, Scotland even had its own version of revenuers and black market whisky manufactured in small, hidden stills!

I wish the kids could have come with us on the tour of the working still, because look at all that lovely fermenting bacteria that Syd could have seen!

Hmmm, maybe we should try to catch some wild yeast and make our own sourdough again. That would be another good culinary extension to her biology study!

Here's an original Casey Jones still. He built it for the FBI, at their request, after his imprisonment and subsequent retirement, and it's now a display piece above the distillery's bar:

And here's a working model of that still, a copy built by Casey's grandson, AJ:

This is the still that makes all of the bourbon sold by Casey Jones Distillery. They were running the still while we were there, so we got to watch the glass jugs being filled--

--AND we got to taste some moonshine fresh from the still!

Casey Jones doesn't have a rickhouse or big bottling area like Member's Mark. Here's its storage and bottling area in one:

We got another history lesson just on the handcrafted wooden barrels used to age bourbon:

The cooperage will even fire the inside according to the distillery's specifications, and it's the burnt inside of the barrel that colors the finished bourbon:

You can apparently buy used staves, complete with the burned side and the devil's cut of bourbon saturated inside. Our tour guide said they're awesome for smoking meat.

It probably didn't help that I was tipsy, but I got SUPER into the history of moonshining and its impact on the local economies here. Here's a display of artifacts that I pored over:

And here's a $35, spiral-bound, self-published book written by Casey Jones, himself, that I REALLY wanted but did not buy:

It was so awesome. It was essentially all photocopied from original typewritten pages, and the preface consisted of Jones, with lots of spelling errors and grammar mistakes, writing about how now that he was old he wished he'd taken his education more seriously, but also, it was brilliant and had such a vivid authorial voice. My favorite kind of outsider art! I had the thought that maybe I could interlibrary loan it when I got home, but of course it has no ISBN or Worldcat or OCLC entry. I'll just have to go back to Hopkinsville one day and buy it!

After the distillery, we were both starving and frankly, I was still a little tipsy, so we ate barbecue. It was freaking delicious, and I'm still sad that I ate so much pulled pork that I didn't have room for pie. 

On a previous family road trip years ago, we very briefly detoured into Chattanooga, but it didn't help us with wayfinding AT ALL. Genuinely helpful was our hotel's location just across the street from a minor league baseball field, and imagine my delight when at the conclusion of that evening's game, they had a fireworks show!

And because I'd planned the trip, I'd been able to pick a much nicer hotel than Matt would have been happy springing for. BUT it was in easy walking distance of almost everything we wanted to do and was super roomy and comfy.

Matt definitely made fun of me for having my name on the TV, though...

And I got to text the kids to show them that no matter where you go, you'll always have an Office marathon!

When my Girl Scout troop was in Montgomery, Alabama, some of the kids had really wanted to order Mellow Mushroom pizza, but it was closed. I was excited, then, to see that not only was there a Mellow Mushroom in Chattanooga, BUT it was open AND it was only a couple of blocks from our hotel!

Unfortunately, it tasted really gross, soft and almost undercooked:

Good thing I had the foresight to pack all those car snacks!