You Don't Know Jack

October 29, 2004 -- Modern Drunkard editor Frank Kelly Rich has been keeping us abreast of the battle to restore Jack Daniels to its original strength. The distillery quietly lowered the proof from 86 to 80 recently, claiming that’s what customers wanted. Wrong. Check out Frank’s missive.
A Jack drinker's joke billboard	Jack drinkers are pissed. The funniest stuff has been posted on Fark.com, with some taking the philosophical view, such as: “Who cares? Anyone who really enjoys their whiskey has been making it in their bathtub for years. Lightweights.” Frank thinks JD parent Brown-Forman is going to try and weather the storm, but so far over 7,000 signatures have been added to the online petition.
In all the hubbub, we just now checked the enormous 3-litre, unopened bottle of Jack that’s been looming over the hall bar like a hulking beast for the past several months – 86 proof! This monster was a present from a friend at some magazine. Maybe we should enshrine it. More likely it will get decimated at Thanksgiving and all hell will break loose. At school we used to refer to 1.75-litre bottles of booze (what some call a “handle”) as a “mothership.” This thing is more like the “death star.”