George Dickel Rye

George A. Dickel & Co.

Type	Tennessee whiskey
Manufacturer	Diageo
Country of origin	Tennessee, United States
Introduced	1877
Alcohol by volume	40% 43% 45%
Proof (US)	80 86 90
Related products	Diageo PLC

George Dickel is a brand of Tennessee whiskey owned by Diageo PLC produced in Cascade Hollow, Tennessee. Its distillery is part of the American Whiskey Trail and offers tours to the public. A George Dickel rye whiskey is also sold.

The brand's labels use the traditional Scottish spelling of whisky, as opposed to whiskey, although the latter spelling is more common in American English. According to the company, this is because Dickel believed his product to be as smooth and high in quality as the best Scotch whiskies.

Five whiskies are produced under the George Dickel brand:

George A. Dickel was born in Germany in 1818, and immigrated to the United States in 1844. He founded a retail business in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1850s, and began selling liquor in 1861. After the Civil War, he operated a liquor store on South College Street in Nashville. In the late 1860s, he founded George A. Dickel and Company, a wholesaling firm which bought whiskey from regional distillers and distributed it in barrels, jugs and bottles. In 1871, Meier Saltzkotter, who had worked as a superintendent for Dickel, became a partner in the company. Victor Emmanuel Shwab (1847–1924), a brother-in-law of Dickel who had initially worked for the company as a bookkeeper, became a partner in 1881.

Whiskey was being produced in Cascade Hollow, near Tullahoma, Tennessee, by John F. Brown and F.E. Cunningham in the 1870s. In 1879, Matthew Sims, a local businessman, bought Brown's share of the operation. In 1883, another local businessman, McLin Davis (1852–1898), joined the partnership. Davis became the operation's distiller, and is credited with the whiskey's recipe. By the early 1890s, Cascade Whisky was one of the more popular brands in the region. The Cascade label included the phrase, "Mellow as Moonlight", which was rooted in Davis's method of cooling mash at night.

Following an accident in 1886, Dickel's health declined, and Shwab gradually took control of the wholesaling firm's daily operations. In 1888, Shwab purchased Sims's share of the Cascade Distillery, whose whiskey Dickel and Company had been selling for years. The terms of the purchase made Dickel and Company the sole distributor of Cascade. Shwab also purchased the popular Climax Saloon in Nashville, and afterward advertised the saloon as the "headquarters" of Cascade Whisky. After Davis's death in 1898, his son, Norman Davis, briefly ran the distillery, but was sued by Shwab and forced to sell his share in the operation.