Tanyard Hill Is Jack Daniel's Newest Hazmat Rye

Over the past few years, one of the biggest stars in the Jack Daniel’s lineup has been Coy Hill. The whiskey, which first hit the scene in 2021 as part of the ongoing Single Barrel Special Releases Series, took the classic Jack Daniel’s profile recipe and cranked it up to 11—showcasing high-proof (often hazmat) single barrels that were aged on the eponymous Coy Hill, the highest point on the distillery’s campus that contains five rickhouses. Last year’s batch, Barrelhouse 8, scored 95 points with our tasting panel, making it one of the highest-rated Jack Daniel whiskeys we’ve ever tasted. Now the distillery is applying that same blueprint to rye with a new expression, Tanyard Hill.

Sky-High Rye

As the name suggests, this release was aged on Tanyard Hill, an area on the western side of the Jack Daniel Distillery campus. Specifically, it’s located southwest of Coy Hill, just up the hill from the Lynchburg Hardware & General Store tourist destination and gift shop. Tanyard has some of Jack Daniel’s oldest-standing rickhouses, including Barrelhouses 101 through 104, all seven stories tall and built in the 1960s. Historically, Tanyard Hill whiskeys have gone into Jack Daniel’s core range products—specifically its mainline Single Barrel Select series, with some bottles carrying Tanyard Hill barrelhouse numbers on their necks—but this is the first time the distillery has intentionally spotlighted it for a specific release.

Tanyard Hill has the same mashbill as Jack’s other ryes—70% rye, 18% corn, and 12% malted barley—and the distillery employed a different approach than usual to the Lincoln County Process, using about one third of the charcoal than it does for its other Tennessee whiskeys and with the filtering lasting only a few minutes rather than 24 hours. (Master distiller Chris Fletcher notes that the full-length process is typically used to remove some of the oily notes from the corn component, which would’ve made it overkill for this rye grain-dominant whiskey.)

The barrel was pulled from a single lot, which was filled on the same day in October 2015 and spent the entirety of its maturation on the top floor of Rickhouse 101. Fletcher has been working on this batch for some time: He started pulling samples three or four years ago to monitor how it was progressing, and knew that it was going to be special. He decided to let the barrels age a little longer, bottling them at 10 years old.

For Single Barrel Special Releases Series expressions like this one, there’s always interest surrounding how high the proofs are. This batch has a fairly wide range, encompassing numerous points between 65.1%–74.4% ABV (130.2–148.8 Proof). The high strength was due in large part to the temperature swings experienced on the top floors of Jack Daniel’s rickhouses, paired with Tanyard Hill’s generally high elevation. (Coy Hill has the highest-elevation rickhouses on the campus, but Tanyard Hill is a close second.) That intense heat did come with a slight drawback: Only around 175 of the lot’s total 200 barrels were included for this release, with the other ones losing a bit too much volume to angels’ share.

Tanyard Hill carries a suggested retail price of $80, and is shipping to retailers nationwide this month. The initial release accounts for around 15,000 700-ml bottles. While fans will likely go out hunting specifically for the bottles at hazmat proof, Fletcher notes that the individual barrels had very similar profiles, touting that the expression is “super consistent” from bottle to bottle. He also confirmed that he’s interested in releasing more of these rickhouse-focused single barrel releases, opening the door to subsequent batches of both Coy Hill and Tanyard Hill. Finally, Fletcher hinted that, in the future, there could be a third release coming from nearby Boiler Hill: a lower-elevation hill on the north side of the campus—sometimes called “Slop Hill” due to its proximity to the distillery’s waste processing unit—that houses Barrelhouses 105, 106, and 107.