Lexie Phillips

Lexie Phillips: A Lynchburg Original 

Just as she has done since she started in 2013, Lexie Phillips makes her short daily drive from where she was born and raised in Estill Springs, Tennessee to the Jack Daniel’s distillery. It is down the quiet, two-lane stretch of smooth country blacktop, past the polite, white-frame houses of small-town Tennessee. Except these days, Lexie has been named the first female Assistant Master Distiller at the renowned whiskey works, operating side-by-side with Master Distiller Chris Fletcher. As the potential heir-apparent to the prestigious legacy, Lexie believes that being a role model to others, especially young women, is an important part of the Jack Daniel’s brand ambassador responsibility. 

In 2011, Lexie received her Bachelor Degree in Agricultural Business from a Middle Tennessee State University and planned her future. Initially eschewing the spirit industry that pervades the region and that had fed much of her family for decades, she first tried her hand at other occupations. Then in 2014, upon her aunt's advice, Phillips interviewed at Jack Daniel’s for a bottling and quality-control position. A self-described “jeans and a t-shirt girl,” her sharp wit and candid honesty impressed the folks in H.R. “I feel most at home on a John Deere,” Phillips confessed to her potential employer. “I change my own oil.” Pretending to be something she was not was out of the question. After all, four generations of Phillips’ family including dozens of her immediate family had worked for the giant Brown-Forman conglomerate, and more than two dozen family members were still currently employed there. In fact, she met her husband, Josh Phillips at the facility where he worked as a processor. Before long, her work ethic and keen interest in grains took over and Lexie developed a passion for the process inside the stillhouse. 

Science has established that women possess keener senses of smell and taste, reputedly allowing them to more easily and accurately detect minute nuances in whiskey flavors. This has given rise to a worldwide influx of high-profile whiskey-making females within the last ten years, several of which are also employed by other Brown-Forman subsidiaries. Phillips believes that her experience in agriculture and the conditions that can influence the flavors that grains impart help her personally understand the whiskey-making business intimately. “Most master distillers have a chemistry background,” Phillips explains, “That’s not me.” The end result, she believes, is a smooth, consistent flagship product, just dissimilar enough from any other on earth, but completely unchanged since Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel and Nathan “Nearest” Green cooked up the first batch of the ultra-consistent juice in 1866. In a world where it is critically important that recipes and ingredients and processes, techniques and traditions are maintained, that the status quo that Tennessee Whiskey-making stay the same as it has for generations. It is said that nothing much ever changes. But Lexie Phillips reckons that when it comes down to it, it is pretty important that, in fact, maybe just a few things do. 

Contributed by: Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee

with support from M. J. (Michael) Jacobs, Tennessee Whiskey Section Editor, Smyrna, Tennessee