Allisa Henley

“A Whiskey Bond”

Allisa Henley has spent nearly two decades helping shape what Tennessee whiskey tastes like and how it’s made. Henley is now Master Distiller and General Manager for Sazerac of Tennessee, where she leads production of a new Tennessee whiskey distilled at what began as Sazerac’s Tennessee facility and is now known internally as the A&J Bond Distillery project. 

Henley was born in 1977 in Coffee County, Tennessee, not far from Cascade Hollow, the home of George Dickel. Surrounded by the culture of Tennessee whiskey long before she was officially in the business, she has said that many of the people she eventually worked with at the distillery were people she grew up around. Even so, when she left home for college, Henley did not think she was on track to be a distiller. She studied business, completing a bachelor’s degree in business administration at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, then she went on to earn an MBA from Lipscomb University in Nashville. Her business training mattered, and it led her to first role in whiskey; not on the still platform but in communications and education.

That opportunity was at George Dickel Distillery. Around 2006, Diageo hired Henley to help design, manage, and define the visitor experience at Cascade Hollow, which meant, in part, writing the distillery tour script. She has said very plainly that she refused to “fake it.” She didn’t want to hand visitors a sales pitch; she wanted to put real process and real science into that script. So, to write it honestly, she walked into production. She shadowed operators. She stood with them at the cooker, the fermenters, and the still. She asked questions, over and over, to people who had been doing the work for decades. She rolled barrels, inspected grain, watched filtration runs, and learned how the mash was cooked and how the whiskey was mellowed. Hanging around the production area also gave Henley to get to know the man who became her close friend and eventual boss, then-Master Distiller John Lunn. Over the next 10 years at George Dickel, Lunn guided Henley to cross the invisible line between hospitality and production. She was trusted with sensory work, mechanics, and day-to-day quality decisions. Eventually, she was recognized as Distiller of George Dickel Tennessee Whisky, a big deal in an industry that, historically, has been dominated by men in that role. The whiskey media at the time described her as “a force to be reckoned with” and emphasized that she had earned that title through persistence and depth of knowledge, not marketing spin.

One of the most widely cited examples of her hands-on influence at Dickel was the discovery and release of some extremely mature Tennessee whisky barrels. As Henley has described it, while pulling samples for Dickel’s Hand Selected Barrel program, she came across a small pocket of whiskey that had aged far longer than expected, about 17 years in single-story warehouses. She recognized immediately that the whiskey was unusually balanced and pushed for a limited release, which became George Dickel 17-Year-Old Reserve Tennessee Whisky. That release drew attention because any whisky that old and that composed is rare, and this in particular carried Henley’s signature as distiller.

Still, the turning point in Allisa’s career came in 2016 when Lunn left Dickel in 2015 to run a new distillery in East Tennessee that had originally been built to produce Popcorn Sutton-branded whiskey. Henley followed close behind, leaving Diageo’s Dickel to join Lunn as Master Blender at Popcorn Sutton. The move put her not just in charge of telling someone else’s story, but in position to help build a new whiskey from the ground up.

In December 2016, Sazerac, the huge multinational spirits conglomerate, somewhat surprisingly bought Popcorn Sutton outright. Sazerac was said not to be buying so much the distillery or the spirit, they were candidly clear that they wanted John Lunn and Allisa Henley. Sazerac’s plan was straightforward: create a new Tennessee whiskey, from Tennessee grain to Tennessee barrel, under Sazerac ownership, and give Lunn and Henley the authority to do it right. From that point forward, Henley’s title and scope expanded. She became Master Distiller for Sazerac of Tennessee and, ultimately, General Manager as well, which put her in charge of both production decisions and day-to-day operations. Her work in this period has included everything from recipe development to still selection to sourcing local corn and even specifying Tennessee oak for barrels. She has said publicly that Sazerac allowed her and Lunn to make the core decisions themselves, such as mash bills, charcoal mellowing method, barrel entry proof, and warehouse strategy, rather than forcing them into an inherited template. The project became known as A&J Bond, and the name is intentionally personal: “A” stands for Allisa, “J” stands for John, and “Bond” refers to the working bond the two shared with each other.