Phil Prichard

The Lincoln County Process is a requirement for today’s Tennessee distilleries to meet the classification “Tennessee Whiskey”; however, there is one distillery that has been granted an exemption from this requirement, and today, it is the only distillery in the state of Tennessee not to produce its whiskey using this guideline.  The CEO and Master Distiller of Pritchard’s is Phil Prichard. He founded the distillery in 1997 while in search of creating the first native American rum in over 250 years. Phil credits his fifth-generation grandfather, Benjamin Prichard, with being an early pioneer for distilling whiskey in Tennessee’s Davidson County in the late 1700s.

Philip Edward Prichard was born in August 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee.  Phil worked as a dental technician for some 30 years before moving to Vermont in 1980. Two years later, he would marry his wife Connie.  After becoming bored with his career, Phil was presented with an opportunity to purchase a small farm in upstate New York.  Included in the purchase was a Christmas shop.  Both he and Connie operated the storefront for roughly 6 years, but a threefold increase in property taxes forced the two to decide to close the store and move back to Tennessee in 1993.

Phil found a job in Tennessee working in sales for a telemarketing company. After being terminated from his position, despite often leading the team in sales, he recalled a past conversation with his cousin, Mack Prichard, who had shared that his father had a belief that rum could be made with a pot still using sorghum molasses.  After doing some research, Phil had converted his wife Connie’s old canning pot into a still and was soon making batches of rum from sorghum molasses on their stovetop.   After winning Connie’s approval, Phil reached out to an old classmate from high school by the name of Victor Robilio, whose family was in the wine and spirits business in Memphis.  It was Robilio who motivated Phil to take his leap into the spirits business by admitting that Phil’s stovetop concoction was one of the finest rums he had ever tasted.

A major obstacle to the upstart distillery at the time was that only two Tennessee counties were allowed to distill.  These two counties were the home of Jack Daniels (Moore County) and George Dickel (Coffee County). With Phil seeking a home and permit for distilling, he met with the county aldermen of these counties seeking the necessary referendum.  Unfortunately, county officials were not in favor of another distillery and shared their disapproval with local media outlets. Fortunately for Pritchard, the story backfired and provided free advertisement.  Soon, nearby Lincoln County came calling.  The county’s mayor, Jerry Mansfield, pitched a historic old schoolhouse in Kelso, Tennessee, as a potential destination.  Ironically, its location is just a few miles south of where Phil’s great-great-great-grandfather Benjamin distilled whiskey nearly two centuries prior.  Prichard’s Distillery then became the first legal distillery in Tennessee in nearly fifty years and only the third since prohibition.

Prichard’s was incorporated in the Fall of 1997 and began distilling rum in December 1999.  Before going all-in, Phil was fortunate to discover from the TTB (Tennessee Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade Bureau) that sorghum molasses was not a viable rum option, but they helpfully assisted him in identifying a quality replacement to continue moving forward with production. As capacity necessitated, Phil reached out to Vendome to locate a larger still.  After finding a slightly used still in Vermont and personally transporting it back to Tennessee, Phil utilized his soldering skills learned as a dental technician to get the still installed and functional.  Rum would be his gateway spirit and a much-needed revenue source to further invest in growth.  When production commenced, Pritchard quickly identified other products they could make without having to age them. including Sweet Lucy.  For millennia, Sweet Lucy was a popular southern bourbon liqueur, born in a duck blind, and a frequent companion amongst hunters who, following successful hunts, would take a long swig and enjoy its peach, apricot, and orange notes.  Pritchard’s Sweet Lucy was immediately popular and soon accounted for more than 50% of the distillery’s sales.    

In 2005, Prichard would lean on his family roots to begin distilling whiskey.  Despite having surprisingly robust success in the rum and Sweet Lucy business, it was time to branch out and diversify his spirit selection.  Following in his grandpa Benjamin Prichard’s footsteps, Phil used white corn in his mashbill for producing whiskey, learning that white corn on a red cob was what was farmed in Tennessee during the late 1700s.  This was different than other states’ distilleries, which used the more commonplace yellow corn.  Additionally, wanting to stay as close to the original recipe as possible, Phil chose to use a pot still to mimic production, knowing that the column still or the Coffey still had not yet been invented in his grandfather’s time.

In 2013, the State of Tennessee, ever protective of its large distilleries, passed new requirements related to the State whiskey and bourbon industry with little pushback from locals. This requirement came to be known as the Lincoln County Process, and involves filtering whiskey through hardwood charcoal before being aged in order to remove impurities and unwanted flavors.  The law was always in place, but it was quite vague. However, Phil Prichard was now a player in the local whiskey game, and he was vocal about its rejection.  Soon, Phil got a crash course in politics and found himself before the state defending his distillery as well as Grandfather Benjamin Prichard’s 200-year-old distillation process. In the end, Prichard’s Distillery was successful in getting an exemption from the Lincoln County Process, and today is the only distillery in the State of Tennessee NOT to be held to its guidelines for Tennessee Whiskey.

Anyone desiring to visit a distillery on the Tennessee Whiskey Trail today will almost certainly hear of the Lincoln County Process and its requirement for distilleries throughout the state.  Likewise, nearly everyone is aware that there is an exception to this rule, and that exception is Prichard’s Distillery; the only Tennessee distillery that is, in fact within Lincoln County but is ironically and somewhat humorously the only distillery not obligated to follow the process for which the county is famous.

Contributed by Brad Martens, Columbia, Missouri