In Lynchburg, Tennessee, a steady procession of black box trucks bearing Jack Daniel’s name commences at six in the morning, ferrying barrels to and from warehouses located miles from the distillery. At Buffalo Trace the warehouses are clustered around the cistern room and connected by a system of parallel rails that use gravity to get the job done. Barrel rollers heave the barrels onto the track then push them in groups of fifteen to twenty toward one warehouse or another. If this batch is going to the third floor, then the barrels are loaded five at a time into a freight elevator. On the third floor they’re rolled from the elevator to the ricker, a four-foot-square platform mounted on a hydraulic lift. Each barrel is lifted to the man kneeling on the platform and the two in turn are lifted to the empty tier and the worker “sets” the barrel. All the barrels in a warehouse are resting “money side up” or with the bung hole topside to guard against leaking and to provide access to the barrel’s contents. Straight up noon is the goal but variance toward one o’clock or eleven o’clock is tolerated. Cheat sheets are sometimes written on the end of ricks. “Start bung, 9 o’clock.” So if the man on the platform sets the first barrel so that the bung hole points to 9 o’clock, then the barrel will roll the 26 feet to the end of the rick and stop money side up. The second barrel will be set at 10 o’clock, and so on.

Barrel rollers have noticeable biceps and are good at their job. One of the most popular events at the annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown is the barrel rolling competition, the whiskey maker’s version of rodeo. Both male and female teams from each distillery compete against each other for time and skill at rolling the money side up.

“It takes us four hours to roll about 380 barrels to the warehouse and rick ‘em,” Obie Kemper told me. After working decades at Buffalo Trace he’s retired now but showed me around the distillery on a visit pre-retirement. “Sometimes we have women choose the warehouse,” he says, “and I tell you, they’re healthy women. We used to have crews of leak hunters but the barrels have got so much better we don’t have to do much of that anymore.”

One week Kemper retrieves samples from “every day of October whiskey” and the next week he’s on to November whiskey. Armed with a small rechargeable drill, a cedar plug, and an empty bottle he drills a quarter-inch hole, fills the bottle, and pushes in the plug within a minute or two, never spilling a drop.

In other decades retrieving a sample meant prying open the bung hole and inserting a bourbon thief to draw out a taste. A bourbon thief, also called a whiskey thief since it’s also used by Scottish and Irish distillers, is a hollow copper tube two to three feet long, about two inches in diameter. One end is capped and the other is open. The capped end is centered with a small hole that one covers with the thumb after the thief has been inserted into a barrel through the bung hole. The thief is withdrawn and when the hole is uncovered the whiskey runs out the open end, like a simple straw siphon. A thief was once a daily tool and now considered an antique.

Kemper is trim and muscular and has a reputation as a pretty good barrel dancer. For years he performed at the Bourbon Festival with a 500-pound partner on a small wooden stage about eight feet square. With the first few notes of Sweet Georgia Brown, Kemper set the rhythm then twirled and bounced the barrel like it was nothing. You can see him giving a casual twirl at Buffalo Trace at youtube.com/watch?v=WUzFlTKN22U.