Jack Daniel's is not bourbon. Or is it?

My mind is abrim right now with metaphors and analogies.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," Shakespeare has Juliet say to her Romeo.

“I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you,” goes the punch line to an old, cruel joke.

Among humans generally, walking is commonplace, yet a baby’s first steps are momentous.

So it is that when a person discovering the world of spirits learns that “Jack Daniel’s is not bourbon,” a milestone has been reached. But since in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, some people wield that knowledge like a cudgel over the unenlightened, not realizing that in doing so they reveal their own deeper ignorance.

Jack Daniel’s is not bourbon. It is, instead, Tennessee whiskey. Yet the two products are almost identical. The distilled spirits industry classifies both, along with some minor types, as American straight whiskey, to distinguish them from the other principal type of whiskey made in the United States, American blended whiskey.

Tennessee whiskey is made exactly like bourbon whiskey except the Tennessee makers go through a step bourbon makers do not. They run the new-make spirit through thick stacks of charcoal before it goes into the barrel for aging. How much real difference this makes is a matter for debate, but it is the only difference.

It gets confusing because federal law regulates use of the term “bourbon,” whereas there is no comparable law regarding “Tennessee whiskey.” If you want to label a product “bourbon,” you have to make sure it matches the legal definition. The makers of Tennessee whiskey are under no similar obligation. For the feds, "whiskey" is sufficient.

Where people go wrong is assuming that the absence of the word “bourbon” means the product is prohibited from being so called, when that is not necessarily the case. It can also mean that the producer simply does not want to use the word “bourbon,” preferring some other descriptor instead.

Here, as in Shakespeare’s example, something not called bourbon may be identical to it for all practical purposes: A bourbon by any other name.

This is not an ancient dilemma. Putting a modifier in front of “whiskey” wasn’t important for most of American history. Whiskey was a distilled spirit made from grain. Domestic type distinctions were as unknown as distinctions based on national origin, as very little whiskey was imported.

The modern battle over non-bourbon versus bourbon is essentially a struggle between two large commercial rivals, Brown-Forman Corporation and Beam Global Spirits & Wine.

Brown-Forman owns Jack Daniel’s, the world’s best selling American-made whiskey, and as we all know Jack Daniel’s is not bourbon. Beam Global makes Jim Beam, which is the world’s best selling bourbon, even though it does not outsell Jack Daniel’s. When you understand that, it’s easy to see why Beam thinks the word “bourbon” is extremely important while Brown-Forman doesn’t, even though Brown-Forman is also in the bourbon business (Woodford Reserve, Old Forester).

So when you ask a bartender what bourbons they have, “Jack Daniel’s” is wrong, yet if the bartender assumes you want to know what bourbon-like beverages are available, it’s right. Does that mean you asked the wrong question? Not necessarily, because if you instead ask what whiskeys they have, they’re likely to name only scotches.

But that is a subject for another day.