Ep. 250: John Emerald Distilling Company with Jimmy Sharp Show Notes
John Emerald Distilling Company: Jimmy Sharp on Alabama Single Malt, Local Grain, and Plowing New Ground in the Deep South
This episode takes us back to Alabama, a state we’ve only visited once before on The Whiskey Ring Podcast.
That earlier conversation was with Dread River, and one of the points that came up then still holds: Alabama, and really the Deep South more broadly, doesn’t have the density of distilleries that you find in Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, Texas, or parts of the Pacific Northwest. There are pockets of real work being done, but there isn’t yet the same wider conversation around what Alabama whiskey is, what it could be, or how the climate, agriculture, and history might shape it.
So when a distillery like John Emerald comes along, it catches my attention.
I’m joined this week by Jimmy Sharp, founder, distiller, and, by necessity, wearer of many hats at John Emerald Distilling Company in Opelika, Alabama. John Emerald is a major piece of modern Alabama spirits history because it was the first legal whiskey distillery in the state since Prohibition. That alone would make it worth talking about, but the actual story is much better than a simple “first since Prohibition” headline.
Jimmy and his father started the distillery in 2013 after years of talking about the idea. They built it around family history, began with an Alabama single malt instead of bourbon, smoked a portion of the malt with peach and pecan wood, and have spent more than a decade figuring out how to make whiskey, rum, brandy, gin, liqueurs, and now bottled-in-bond bourbon and rye in a state without much modern distilling precedent.
There’s Springbank in the origin story, Alabama licensing weirdness, open fermentation, local grain, Auburn agricultural research, Riverbend Malt House, virgin oak in heat and humidity, muscadine grapes, cane syrup cooks, agricole-style rum, an accidental high malt rye, and a fig liqueur that once offended Germany.
In other words, a normal episode.
Coming Home and Building Around Family
Jimmy and his father had been talking about opening a distillery for the better part of a decade before John Emerald became real.
The thing that finally pushed it from idea to action was family. Jimmy was on the road constantly for work with a subcontracting company, often home only one weekend a month. Then, while he was in Brazil, his wife called to tell him they were expecting their first child. That was the moment when the distillery stopped being someday and became now.
Because family was the reason for starting, it became the frame for the brand as well. John Emerald was Jimmy’s grandfather’s first and middle name, and other products in the lineup are named for ancestors, including Elizabeth and Hugh Wesley. Even Jimmy’s own entry into whiskey came through family history. He became interested in Scotch while studying his Scottish background, and as he says in the episode, you can’t really learn about Scotland without learning about Scotch.
That personal path helps explain why John Emerald started with single malt, which is not the obvious move for a new American craft distillery in Alabama. Most distilleries start with bourbon, rye, moonshine, gin, vodka, or something that can either get to market quickly or already has a familiar consumer language around it. Jimmy started with single malt because that’s where his palate, training, and family story all pointed.
It was a bold way to begin, though “bold” may be the polite version. Starting an Alabama distillery with single malt is the kind of decision that probably makes sense after the first pour and seems mildly unhinged on a business plan.
Fortunately, whiskey rewards a little productive unhinging.
Springbank, Seibel, and Learning What the Work Actually Feels Like
Before opening, Jimmy and his father went looking for as much training as they could find.
They both took technical training at the Seibel Institute in Chicago. Jimmy’s father also went to whiskey school in Breckenridge, Colorado, and rum school in Loveland, Colorado. Jimmy’s most important hands-on experience came at Springbank in Campbeltown, Scotland, where he spent about a month doing the work at a commercial scale.
His father did not join him for that one once he learned the work included traditional floor malting and the cheerful prospect of shoveling enormous amounts of wet grain in and out of steeping tanks. I respect the clarity.
Jimmy, though, wanted that physical experience. He hadn’t been a Springbank drinker before going, largely because it wasn’t available on shelves in Alabama, but he was looking for the kind of training you can’t get by reading or tinkering in a garage. Springbank gave him that: old equipment, traditional processes, physical labor, and a distillery he describes almost as a working museum.
He didn’t come home trying to make Campbeltown whiskey in Alabama. That’s important. The Springbank experience gave him a feel for process, scale, and tradition, but John Emerald was always going to be something else. The question wasn’t how to copy Scotland. It was how to take that education and apply it to Alabama ingredients, Alabama climate, and a brand built around his own family.
Jimmy also visited as many small distilleries as he could, not because any one of them had the whole answer, but because seeing enough operations helped him sort the difference between preference and necessity. Some production decisions are just the way one distillery does things. Others are critical.
Open fermentation became one of those critical points for him. After seeing multiple small distilleries using open fermentation and liking the spirits coming out of them, he started thinking through why it mattered. His view is that open fermentation puts yeast in a state of competition with bacteria and other organisms, which changes how it metabolizes and affects flavor. Closed fermentation can be too clean, maybe too pampered, while whiskey fermentation can benefit from a little microbial street fight before the wash heads to the still.
It’s not exactly the Hallmark version of fermentation, but it makes sense. Yeast, apparently, needs some adversity to develop character. Deeply inconvenient how often that’s true.
Alabama Whiskey After a Century-Long Gap
John Emerald occupies a strange historical position because Alabama didn’t have much of a modern legal whiskey tradition waiting for it.
Alabama went dry before national Prohibition, and legal whiskey production disappeared from the state for roughly a century. Jimmy couldn’t find much evidence of major pre-Prohibition Alabama whiskey brands to recreate. Jack Daniel apparently spent a brief period in Birmingham after Tennessee passed its own Prohibition laws, only for Alabama to follow and shut that escape hatch almost immediately. That’s one of those whiskey-history detours that feels both fascinating and deeply annoying for everyone involved.
Beyond that, Jimmy imagines much of the whiskey made in Alabama would have been farmer-made, probably young or unaged, produced from excess grain rather than bottled under commercial brands in the way we think of whiskey now.
That meant there was no old Alabama bottle to taste and reverse-engineer. There wasn’t a continuous house style to inherit. John Emerald wasn’t recreating something specific from the past. It was trying to establish a modern Alabama whiskey language almost from scratch.
That can be freeing, but it also means there isn’t a map.
The Licensing Maze
The regulatory side of opening John Emerald sounds like a riddle written by two government offices that had never met for coffee.
The TTB required Jimmy to have the still installed before granting the federal license. Alabama law, meanwhile, made it illegal to possess a still without the proper federal license. So the federal government was effectively saying, “You need the still first,” while the state was saying, “Having the still first makes you a criminal.”
At one point, someone from the state joked that it would be the easiest arrest they’d ever make.
Jimmy did not find this joke especially soothing.
It did all work out, and Jimmy is fair about Alabama’s ABC. He says the product management side was more helpful than people might expect, given the laws they had to work within. At the local level, Opelika was motivated and supportive too, though there were practical challenges simply because there hadn’t been distilleries for the city and county to license in modern memory.
The craft beer movement helped in an unexpected way. Recent changes meant to support breweries also created openings for distilleries. When John Emerald opened, they couldn’t sell bottles from the distillery, which was a serious financial limitation, but they could sell cocktails and drinks. That gave them a way to keep revenue moving while whiskey aged.
More recently, John Emerald helped form an Alabama distillers guild, with Dread River also deeply involved. The guild has already helped pass a bill allowing distilleries to sell beer and wine they don’t make in their tasting rooms and to sell bottles at festivals around the state.
Those may sound like small things from the outside, but for a small distillery in a control state, small things are often the difference between another barrel filled and another barrel not filled. Progress comes one bite at a time, preferably without anyone threatening to arrest you for owning the equipment you were required to own.
Opelika and the Local Piece of the Story
John Emerald ended up in Opelika after an earlier plan in Montgomery fell through.
That seems to have worked out well. Opelika was in the middle of a downtown renaissance, and the distillery found a home in an old cotton warehouse. The city was supportive, and the location offered a useful balance: close enough to Auburn and Auburn University to benefit from that energy, but not so embedded in a university town that the distillery got swallowed by it.
Jimmy says John Emerald brings roughly 100 people a week into town for tours. Those visitors eat, drink, walk around, and give Auburn-Opelika tourism another distinctive thing to point toward. The relationship is symbiotic: the tourism department helps John Emerald, and John Emerald gives visitors a reason to spend time in Opelika.
That’s one of the quieter ways small distilleries can matter. They don’t just make bottles. They give a downtown another anchor, another stop, another story. In a place like Opelika, John Emerald is part of the current version of the town as much as the old cotton warehouse is part of its past.
Why the First Whiskey Was an Alabama Single Malt
John Emerald’s first whiskey was a single malt, and the more Jimmy explains it, the more it feels less like a contrarian choice and more like the only choice that made sense for him.
He trained at a single malt distillery. He was a Scotch drinker. His interest in whiskey came through Scottish family history. The brand itself was built around family. Single malt tied those pieces together in a way bourbon wouldn’t have, even if bourbon would have been the more obvious American move.
The more distinctive decision was the smoke.
John Emerald’s Alabama Single Malt uses malted barley with a portion smoked over peach and pecan wood. The thinking is wonderfully direct: Alabama doesn’t have peat, so why pretend? If the goal is to make something that speaks to where it comes from, use what’s available. Peach and pecan wood give the whiskey a regional smoke signature without turning it into Scotch theater.
Only 20% of the grain is smoked, with that smoked portion split between peach and pecan wood. I had the cask-strength Special Reserve with me for the interview, and what struck me was how measured the smoke was. Wood smoke can be beautiful, but it can also shove the barley into a locker and take over the hallway. Here, it’s present without steamrolling the malt.
That restraint is important. The smoke feels integrated, not pasted on for the brochure.
Ground to Glass, Alabama Barley, and the Long Work of Local Grain
Jimmy uses the phrase ground to glass, and at John Emerald that means more than “we bought something from nearby once and put a tractor on the label.”
For him, it means having a relationship with the grower, whether that grower is contracted to produce something specifically for the distillery or is already growing something John Emerald can use. Jimmy says about 90% of their raw ingredients now come through those direct farm relationships. Barley was the hardest piece of that puzzle.
The single malt began with a very practical question: if you want an Alabama single malt, what barley do you use?
Auburn University had already been researching barley varieties that could grow in the Deep South. That work connected to a larger historical loss. Before Prohibition, more barley varieties grew across the country, often tied to alcohol production. When alcohol production disappeared, the agricultural reason to maintain some of those varieties disappeared with it.
John Emerald eventually began working with Calypso, a variety that was doing well in North Alabama and southern Tennessee. They’ve used it for several years now, and the farms are established. The barley is malted and smoked by Riverbend Malt House in North Carolina, whose equipment is better suited to the task than Jimmy’s early homemade cold-smoking setup. I’m sure the homemade version had charm, but charm and even smoke distribution are not always the same thing.
They’re also testing another Alabama-grown barley, a six-row variety whose name Jimmy could not quite get to behave during the interview. It sounds almost like Secretariat, but apparently is not Secretariat, which is a disappointment only because “horse barley” would be a tremendous tasting room phrase. The important part is that it behaves more like a two-row, offering better yield per acre while still showing promise for distilling. The white dog was bright and clean, perhaps without some of the deeper malt notes Jimmy looks for, but interesting enough to put in barrel.
That’s what local whiskey really requires. You don’t just declare a region. You figure out what grows, what malts, what ferments, what distills cleanly, what ages well, and what farmers can actually afford to keep growing. The romance gets a spreadsheet and muddy boots.
Virgin Oak, American Single Malt, and Alabama Heat
The new American Single Malt regulations didn’t force John Emerald to change what it was doing, which was a relief for Jimmy.
John Emerald was already making whiskey from 100% malted barley, and it was already using barrels. Jimmy is glad the category is now protected, especially because he wasn’t a fan of brands using shortcuts like oak spirals or leaning on multi-distillery blending while still trying to claim the single malt identity. His view is practical: do what you want, but call it what it is. If the whiskey is outside what single malt should mean, let it be whiskey and stand honestly on that ground.
John Emerald’s single malt is aged in virgin oak, which dates back both to older federal malt whiskey requirements and to Jimmy’s own desire to create some transitional flavors for bourbon drinkers. New oak brings vanilla, color, sweetness, and familiar American whiskey cues, giving bourbon drinkers a bridge into malt whiskey.
The challenge, of course, is that Alabama is not gentle with oak.
Early on, John Emerald used quarter casks for the single malt and found that around two and a half years was the sweet spot. Any longer and the oak began to dominate, throwing off the balance and becoming too astringent. As they moved into 53-gallon barrels, they dropped the char level from #3 to #2, which helped keep the oak in check. Now they have single malt barrels around seven years old that are still improving.
Jimmy’s shorthand is that an Alabama four-year-old can drink like a Kentucky six-year-old. There’s enough heat to drive serious barrel activity, but also enough cold to give the whiskey real seasonal contraction. He suspects that if you went even farther south into a climate without that cold, the whiskey might risk becoming mostly oak. Alabama gives John Emerald fast color and extraction, but the cold still helps keep the process from becoming one-dimensional.
It’s not just heat. It’s heat with a little winter discipline.
Lautering, Yeast, and the Practical Side of Malt Whiskey
John Emerald lautering its single malt may sound like a small detail, but it tells you a lot about how Jimmy thinks.
The distillery uses what he calls a Swiss Army knife mash tun. It can work as a lauter tun for single malt or as a cereal mash setup for bourbon. There’s a removable false bottom, rakes, and a sparge arm. Coming from homebrewing, lautering made sense to Jimmy from the start. If you’re making full-grain beer, you learn to sparge.
They’ve tested grain-in fermentation for single malt, but the difference wasn’t dramatic enough to outweigh the yield advantage of lautering. The mash is a little sweeter when sparged, and yield matters. Small distilleries can be romantic about process, but they still have to survive the math.
Yeast changes by product as well. John Emerald uses one strain specifically for malt whiskey and another for grain whiskies. Bourbon and rye use the same grain whiskey strain, while the single malt gets its own. Jimmy says there’s some flavor difference, but a lot of the decision comes down to yield and suitability. The malt yeast is better at eating malt sugars. The grain yeast is better at handling corn sugars.
That kind of practical detail is easy to overlook, but it’s part of the difference between “we made something once” and “we can keep making this well.”
Moving From Purveyor Series to In-House Bourbon and Rye
John Emerald is in the middle of a transition.
The Purveyor Series bourbon and rye were contract distilled with a partner in South Carolina, then aged and finished by John Emerald in Alabama. The bourbon used a four-grain mash bill: 55% corn, 20% wheat, 20% rye, and 5% malted barley. It was designed as a more universal bourbon, something approachable, useful, and flexible. The bourbon received a toasted oak finish, while the rye was finished with charred pecan wood.
That series had a different purpose than the new in-house whiskeys.
The upcoming Alabama Red Bourbon is a wheated bourbon built around Bloody Butcher corn, while the Alabama High Rye Bourbon uses yellow dent corn and rye. Both move to higher corn percentages, with 67% corn, 25% flavor grain, and 8% malted barley. Jimmy and the team developed those mash bills partly by making teas from the grains and blending the teas in different proportions to get a preview, however imperfect, of what the mash bills might offer.
I love that approach because it feels both homespun and deeply logical. Tiny grain infusions as ghost-whiskey sketches.
The move from a four-grain contract-distilled bourbon to distinct in-house wheated and high-rye bourbons also lets each style be more itself. The old Purveyor bourbon was meant to be broad and complete. The new bourbons can be more focused: one letting wheat do what wheat does, the other letting rye step forward.
The labels help explain the shift. John Emerald’s ground-to-glass products carry animal imagery on the label. The Purveyor Series does not. Jimmy is clear that blending and contract distilling are not bad, but he wants the customer to understand the distinction. If it’s ground-to-glass John Emerald, the label says so visually. If it’s a Purveyor release, that’s handled differently.
The whiskey world could use more of that kind of design honesty. Half the time, the front label acts like a stage magician. John Emerald is at least trying to show where the trapdoors are.
The Accidental High Malt Rye
One of the best stories in the episode is the high malt rye.
Jimmy intended to make a rye whiskey with a 90% rye, 10% malted barley mash bill. He left notes for his assistant distiller, went on a trip, and when he came back, the mash had been built differently. His handwriting, apparently a small feral animal, had been read as two-thirds rye and one-third malt.
The whiskey turned out beautifully.
When Jimmy pulled a sample during a barrel club tasting, people loved it enough that he changed the plan and bottled one barrel early. He had originally expected to wait until 2027, but sometimes whiskey kicks the calendar in the shin and tells you it’s ready.
What I like about that story is that it isn’t a gimmick. It’s production reality. A mistake happened, the whiskey worked, and Jimmy was willing to listen. It also fits neatly into John Emerald’s larger story because it uses local grain, it came from the distillery’s own process, and it opened another avenue for what Alabama rye might become.
Bad handwriting is not a recommended production method, but in this case, it deserves a small plaque.
Muscadine Brandy and Giving a Local Grape a Better Job
The muscadine brandy might be one of the most regionally specific products John Emerald makes.
Muscadines grow all over the South, including wild vines in nearby state parks. Plenty of people in the region grew up eating them off the vine, so there’s real nostalgia there. Muscadine wine, though, has a more complicated reputation.
Part of the problem is fermentability. Muscadines don’t naturally reach the potential alcohol expected for table wine, so producers often add sugar. Jimmy doesn’t love the alcohol character that comes from fermented table sugar, and he describes some muscadine wine as something like Kool-Aid with dirt in it. Vivid, brutal, and somehow I know exactly what he means.
For brandy, lower ABV wine isn’t a problem. John Emerald works with muscadine wineries to make no-sugar-added wine, then distills it. The brandy goes into used single malt barrels, often quarter casks, which lets it mature without getting steamrolled by fresh oak.
Jimmy treats the muscadine brandy almost like a side project, but it’s one he clearly believes in. He thinks muscadines deserve a better product and a better reputation. Locally, that can actually be harder because people already think they know what muscadine means. Outside the South, it can read as unfamiliar and intriguing, which gives the brandy a cleaner chance.
That’s one of the funny tensions of local products. Sometimes the farther you get from home, the easier it is to be understood on your own terms.
Alabama Rum, Cane Syrup, and Agricole-Style Funk
John Emerald also makes rum, and the local connection there is more natural than it might first appear.
Alabama may not have a major commercial rum tradition, but it does have sugar cane syrup traditions. Families grow patches of cane, harvest it, press it, and cook the juice down into syrup in kettles or evaporator pans. Jimmy describes syrup cooks as these communal gatherings where people show up with old bottles to get their allotment.
John Emerald’s original rum is made from cane syrup, which is practical because syrup can last through the year and doesn’t spoil like fresh cane juice. The aged version is gentle and approachable, the kind of rum that makes sense for a whiskey drinker crossing the bridge into rum without being thrown directly into the deep end.
The agricole-style rum is a newer, much funkier project.
Fresh cane juice has to be pressed close to the distillery and fermented quickly before wild yeast starts working on it. Jimmy and a few friends went down to cut a quarter acre of cane by hand, apparently under the fatal illusion that a quarter acre sounded manageable. They started around 9 a.m. and were still swinging knives by truck headlights around 8 p.m.
That is the moment when “craft” stops being a brand adjective and starts being lower back pain.
The resulting cane-juice rum came out funky, aromatic, and intense, which is exactly what you want from an agricole-style rum. Jimmy notes that in France he wouldn’t be able to call it agricole because of the Martinique rules, but in the U.S. the term is used more broadly for cane juice rum.
I like this project because it extends the same ground-to-glass thinking beyond whiskey. Sugar cane is grass. You pull it from the dirt, press it, ferment it, distill it, and suddenly you have something that can speak very directly to place. An Alabama agricole-style rum is probably never going to be a massive volume product, but it may be one of the clearest little lightning bolts in the portfolio.
Maturation, Heat Cycling, and Learning to Leave It Alone
Jimmy’s maturation experiments were one of my favorite parts of the conversation because they get at something every young distillery has to confront.
In the early years, John Emerald tested controlled heat cycling against barrels left more naturally to the elements. The logic was understandable. Alabama is hot and humid, and if you could simulate seasonal movement more quickly, maybe you could accelerate the good parts of maturation.
At first, the heat-cycled barrels seemed ahead. They showed more complexity after about a year. By around a year and a half to two years, the two groups had equalized. After that, the naturally matured barrels were better.
That changed how Jimmy thinks about aging.
Rapid-aging techniques can accelerate extraction. They can increase surface contact and help move compounds from oak into spirit. What they can’t really shortcut is the deeper transformation that comes with ester formation, oxidation, pressure changes, and actual seasons doing actual season things.
The lesson Jimmy took from that was humbling: the less he messes with the barrels, the better they tend to become.
That’s a hard thing for a new distiller to accept because young whiskey is always better than it was before. It’s easy to taste something at 18 months, compare it to where it started, and feel like you’ve arrived. But the better comparison is not the whiskey against itself six months ago. It’s the whiskey against the quality level you want it to reach.
Jimmy talks about getting out of his own bubble, tasting widely, and avoiding the trap of either declaring victory too early or chasing someone else’s flavor profile too closely. His line about the market not needing a very good copy of Maker’s Mark that costs ten dollars more should be painted somewhere visible in every startup distillery.
There’s a difference between inspiration and impersonation. John Emerald seems much more interested in the former.
The Fig Liqueur Incident
I have to mention the fig liqueur.
John Emerald makes several liqueurs, including fig, pecan, and satsuma, and I was especially excited about the fig because I like the weird things. Jimmy used to joke at tastings that it was officially the world’s best fig liqueur because it was the world’s only fig liqueur.
Then a German woman corrected him with such force that he wisely retired the claim.
Apparently, Germany has entered the fig liqueur chat.
Still, it’s rare, especially in the U.S., and it fits the John Emerald portfolio nicely: regional flavor, a little oddball charm, enough specificity to make it memorable, and a good story sitting right there in the glass.
John Emerald’s Legacy
I closed by asking Jimmy what he wants John Emerald’s legacy to be.
His answer begins with the obvious: John Emerald is the first legal whiskey distillery in Alabama since Prohibition, and they want to keep their mark on that. They helped kick off the modern Alabama whiskey conversation, and they’re helping define what Alabama whiskey is or can be.
But Jimmy isn’t trying to build the biggest distillery in the state, and he’s not in a hurry to grow for the sake of growth. The goal is to keep doing what they believe is the right way, with the understanding that the right way keeps evolving as they learn. Keep establishing and reestablishing the brand. Keep their little nook in the market. Grow from there.
And, in Jimmy’s words, have fun and make whiskey.
That’s a good answer. It’s also a very grounded one. John Emerald didn’t enter a state with a mature legal distilling ecosystem, a clear whiskey identity, or a deep bench of predecessors to learn from. They had to figure out regulation, agriculture, fermentation, maturation, product identity, tourism, and consumer education at the same time.
They started with single malt because Jimmy’s story led there. They smoked malt with peach and pecan wood because Alabama doesn’t have peat and pretending otherwise would make no sense. They moved toward local grain because ground to glass only means something if the ground is actually involved. They made muscadine brandy because a local grape deserved a better fate than being dismissed as sticky Southern nostalgia. They made rum because cane syrup already belonged to the region. They bottled an accidental high malt rye because sometimes a mistake is only a mistake until you taste it.
That’s a pretty good Alabama whiskey story.
Being first sounds great in a press release. In practice, it means there’s no clear model to follow. No local old bottle to reverse engineer. No established regulatory muscle memory. No shared understanding of what four years in an Alabama warehouse should taste like. Even the practical pieces, from licensing to tasting room rules to festivals, have to be worked out slowly.
John Emerald had to build its own path while making the whiskey that would eventually prove whether the path made sense.
That’s what I enjoyed most about talking with Jimmy. The conversation moved across categories: single malt, bourbon, rye, rum, brandy, gin, liqueurs. But the thread through all of them was place. Alabama barley. Alabama corn. Peach wood. Pecan wood. Muscadines. Cane syrup. Heat. Humidity. A few cold snaps. Opelika. Family names. Scottish inspiration filtered through Southern agriculture.
The whiskey world still doesn’t spend enough time looking at Alabama. John Emerald is a reminder that some of the more interesting work happens before a region has a crowd, before the style is obvious, before the shelf has a sign telling you what to expect.
A little nook in the market can still make a lot of noise.
John Emerald Distilling Company
Website: https://johnemeralddistilling.com/
Where to Buy: https://johnemeralddistilling.com/where-to-buy/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JEDistilling/
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