George Dickel Distillery

George Dickel is a Tennessee whisky produced at the Cascade Hollow Distilling Co. in Tullahoma, in Coffee County, Tennessee. The brand spells "Whisky" without an "e," a nod to founder George A. Dickel's preference for the Scottish style, and it is one of two long-established Tennessee whisky houses alongside Jack Daniel's. The Sentinel Room carries George Dickel Bottled in Bond Tennessee Whisky in its Reserve Whiskey Library.

History & Heritage

George A. Dickel was born in Germany in 1818 and emigrated to the United States in 1844. He settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where he ran a retail business in the 1850s and began selling liquor in 1861. In the late 1860s he established George A. Dickel and Company, a wholesaling firm that bought whisky from regional distillers. By the 1870s the firm was selling whisky produced in Cascade Hollow, near Normandy, Tennessee, and a controlling interest in the Cascade operation was acquired in 1888.

Tennessee enacted statewide prohibition in 1910, forcing the Cascade operation to move production to Louisville, Kentucky, and national prohibition in 1920 shut it down entirely. After repeal, the Cascade brand passed to the Schenley Distilling Company. Once enabling legislation made it legal again to produce liquor in Coffee County, Schenley's Ralph Dupps built a new distillery in Cascade Hollow, about a mile from the original site. The first mash ran on July 4, 1959, and George Dickel Tennessee Whisky was first bottled in 1964. Through later mergers and buyouts the brand and distillery came to Diageo, which owns them as of July 2026 and renamed the site Cascade Hollow Distilling Co. in 2018.

The Whiskey

The Cascade Hollow site has its own stills and draws water from Cascade Branch on the property, distilling George Dickel Tennessee whisky and bourbon on site. (Diageo paused distilling and barrel-filling at the site in September 2025 as it managed production volume, with the visitor center remaining open.) The defining step in the whisky is the Lincoln County Process, the charcoal mellowing that distinguishes Tennessee whisky from bourbon. George Dickel takes an unusual approach it calls chill charcoal mellowing: the new-make spirit is chilled to about 40 degrees Fahrenheit before it is mellowed in vats packed with roughly 10 to 12 feet of sugar-maple charcoal, a colder, slower filtration meant to strip harsher notes and yield a smoother spirit.

George Dickel Bottled in Bond Tennessee Whisky, carried by The Sentinel Room, meets the federal Bottled-in-Bond standard: the product of one distillation season and one distiller, aged at least four years in a federally bonded warehouse, and bottled at 100 proof. The series is released as aged batches, typically 11 to 13 years old. The inaugural May 2019 release was a 13-year whisky that was named Whisky Advocate's Whisky of the Year and won a gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.

Why It Matters

George Dickel is the quieter of Tennessee's two heritage whisky names, and the Bottled in Bond series has done much to reframe it as a serious, age-stated pour rather than a value shelf option. For a guest working through the Reserve Whiskey Library, George Dickel Bottled in Bond Tennessee Whisky offers a clear reference point for what the Lincoln County Process and a decade-plus of bonded aging produce in the glass.

Visiting the Distillery

Cascade Hollow Distilling Co. in Tullahoma is open to the public. As of July 2026 the distillery operates Thursday through Tuesday for distillery tours, self-guided tastings, and shopping, and it is a stop on the American Whiskey Trail.