George Dickel - History

History

George Dickel was born in 1818. He founded a retail business in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1850s. The Cascade Tennessee Whisky brand was first produced in 1870. The Cascade Hollow distillery was founded in 1877 by John F. Brown and F. E. Cunningham. George Dickel bought a controlling interest in the distillery in 1884. He also bought the exclusive rights to bottle and sell the whiskey. Dickel withdrew from daily operations of the distillery in 1888 and died in 1894.

After Dickel's death, his share in the company was willed to his wife Augusta, along with the advice to sell out. Augusta opted instead to retain her share of the company until the time of her death in 1916, when George's brother-in-law and long-time business partner V. E. Shwab took over full control of the distillery. Tennessee prohibition forced distilling operations to move to Kentucky in 1910. National Prohibition forced them to shut down altogether.

In 1933, national prohibition was repealed. Shwab had died in 1924, and in 1937 his family sold the Cascade trademark to the Schenley Distilling Company. In the 1940s and 1950s, Schenley's product, produced at the OFC Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, was marketed as "Geo. A. Dickel's Cascade Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky".

In 1931, Schenley attempted to buy the Jack Daniel's brand. After its offer was refused, Schenley decided instead to return one of their own brands to its roots and compete against Daniel's. In 1958, after passage of enabling legislation and a referendum, Schenley's Ralph Dupps reconstructed the Cascade Hollow distillery and the original recipe, and George Dickel Tennessee Whisky was first bottled in 1964. Schenley opted to use George Dickel's name as the trademark because of the Cascade brand's reputation for value. Schenley shut down the Tennessee bottling operation in the 1980s, and the whiskey has since been hauled in tanker trucks for bottling elsewhere. Various mergers and buyouts have resulted in Diageo owning the Dickel brand.

Increased production of George Dickel in the 1990s caused supply to exceed demand. In response, the distillery closed to allow the whiskey's value to rebound. It reopened in 2003, almost too late to prevent a shortage of Old No. 8 in the market by 2007. Diageo introduced a younger, three-year-old expression branded Old-Fashioned Cascade Hollow Batch Recipe to meet demand. The Cascade Distillery currently operates under the supervision of Master Distiller John Lunn.

George Dickel Rye, introduced in 2012, has most of the stages of its production conducted under contract in Indiana, and is then trucked to the Dickel Cascade Distillery site for filtering and bottling. It is mashed, distilled and aged at Lawrenceburg Distillers Indiana (formerly the Seagram Lawrenceburg Distillery).