John Sharp

A Sharp Operation

Not too far from the meandering Chattahoochee River which divides Georgia and Southeast Alabama, sits the small town of Opelika. It is here, that in 2013, father-and-son duo John and Jimmy Sharp set up a distillery to make the first legal whiskey in Alabama in 100 years. Their creation, John Emerald Distillery, is named for John’s father, the late John Emerald Sharp.

Before getting into the legal liquor business, the pair co-owned a very successful interior decorative finishing business that provided ornamental plaster for Louis Vuitton stores worldwide, but the job required them to travel excessively. Once his daughter Lily was born, Jimmy, 51, was done being gone from home. “I refused to miss her growing up”, Jimmy admits. So, that company was sold, and John Emerald Distilling was born. A native of Montgomery, Jimmy Sharp is a professionally trained painter, whose interest in malt led him to complete an immersive whiskey-making internship at Springbank Distillers in Campbelltown, Scotland. Meanwhile, his father, John Sharp, went to whiskey school in Breckenridge, Colorado, and took a technical distilling course at the Siebel Institute in Chicago. After studying the fine art of distilling and then returning to Alabama, the pair discovered an abandoned former cotton warehouse in downtown Opelika, which felt like the perfect place to start producing their own libations.

Their flagship single-malt whiskey is made from 100% malted barley, aged in 15-gallon, virgin Ozark White Oak barrels with a level #2 char for two to four years. John Emerald Distillery also utilizes three-barrel high stacking and a temperature-controlled warehouse, in a peculiar attempt to artificially create season changes and speed up the aging process. “We can smell angel’s share coming out in as little as 2 years”, says Jimmy. “We also want to pay homage to the south.” So, 20% of the malt batch is smoked in peach and pecan wood. Of the unusual malting process, Jimmy confides, “Peat can be aggressive.”

John Emerald also produces gin, rum, vodka, and spiced rum, all named after different family ancestors, and for each, decorates the bottle with the descendant’s “spirit animal”. Inside the distillery, Jimmy, as head distiller, handles day-to-day distilling duties and experiments with flavor profiles, while his dad is a managing member whose job varies with the day, and might include paperwork, running the still, mashing, fermenting, repairing equipment, marketing, giving tours, or whatever else needs doing. The magic takes place in a 350-gallon hybrid pot still, which is part 4-chamber column. “You can make good spirits on bad equipment if you are good enough, but bad spirits on good equipment also”, warns Jimmy, “Our vision is to make an Alabama single malt whiskey that people enjoy. Success will follow if we get that right”. John Emerald must be on the right track so far because the first four cases of single malt that were released sold out in 45 minutes. “Quality over quantity”, adds John. And we couldn’t agree more.

Contributed by: Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee

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

Source cited for this article: Megan Hurley, Opelika-Auburn News via al.com (2015)