Drop a needle on most records and you hear a song. Drop one on the 4-inch disc hanging from the neck of a new Chattanooga Whiskey bottle and you hear the same song the whiskey inside was aged with. That is the premise of Bad Chattanoogan, the first Tennessee whiskey from the Chattanooga distillery, and the company says it is believed to be the first whiskey of any kind finished on toasted maple wood records.
The release went public on Friday, October 23, 2026, at a suggested $64.99 for a 750mL bottle, one night after a 75-person listening party at the distillery's Experimental Distillery. It is a playful idea, but the details behind it are more serious than the hangtag suggests, and they say a good deal about where Chattanooga Whiskey has been heading as its reputation among craft producers has grown.
Thirty Discs of Sugar Maple
The finishing stage is where Bad Chattanoogan earns its headline. According to the distillery, 30 records were cut from solid sugar maple. Each was toasted for 24 hours, then laser-engraved with one of two original songs about Chattanooga. Those wooden records were placed into barrels with the whiskey and left there for 30 days.
That makes the records something more than a gimmick stapled to a label. They are, in practical terms, a wood finish. Distillers have spent decades experimenting with staves, spirals and inserts made from oak and other woods, and toasting is the lever that changes what a piece of wood gives up to spirit. Heat breaks down the wood's structure and draws out sweeter, rounder compounds; the longer and hotter the toast, the more caramelized and roasted the character tends to become. A full day of toasting is a long, deliberate treatment, and sugar maple is a hardwood that whiskey drinkers already associate with sweetness.
The company was blunt about the difference between this project and the usual band tie-in. As the release put it: "Unlike most music-themed whiskeys, the music didn't just inspire this release." In other words, the songs are physically carved into the material that touched the whiskey.
Why a Record Works as a Finishing Insert
A flat disc presents a lot of surface area relative to its volume, and the engraved grooves add more. For a short 30-day finish, surface contact matters, because the whiskey has limited time to pull flavor from whatever is sitting in the barrel with it. Whether the grooves themselves change the flavor in a measurable way is a question for the tasting glass, and the distillery has not made that claim. What it has done is pick a format where the art and the function line up.
Side A, Side B and Two Songs About Home
The music comes from Rich Abercrombie, Chattanooga Whiskey's creative director and the frontman of the Dollars Family. He wrote two original songs about the city, and each song was engraved onto a set of records.
The whiskey is split the same way. Bad Chattanoogan comes in two separately sold blends, labeled Side A and Side B, and each was finished with records bearing one of the two songs. Every bottle, regardless of side, carries a playable 4-inch Tiny Vinyl hangtag with both tracks on it, so a buyer who only picks up one bottle can still hear the whole set.
The two-sided structure is a smart move for a distillery with a loyal local following. It gives collectors an obvious reason to buy both, and it invites side-by-side tasting, which is the most honest way to judge whether two finishes on the same base whiskey actually taste different. The distillery has not published separate tasting notes for each side in the release material reviewed here, so drinkers will have to make that call themselves.
The Whiskey Underneath the Wood
Strip away the vinyl and the base spirit is a substantial pour. Bad Chattanoogan starts as a straight Tennessee whiskey built from three high-malt mash bills, made mainly from Tennessee-grown grain. It was mellowed through sugar maple charcoal, aged more than four years in oak and bottled at 100 proof.
Each of those details matters to a whiskey drinker. Charcoal mellowing through sugar maple is the step that separates Tennessee whiskey from bourbon in the eyes of most producers in the state, and it is the practice usually called the Lincoln County Process. It strips some of the rougher edges from new spirit before it ever goes into a barrel. High-malt mash bills are something of a Chattanooga Whiskey signature; malted barley tends to push a whiskey toward bready, nutty and chocolate notes rather than the lean spice of a high-rye recipe. And 100 proof is the strength that bottled-in-bond fans and cocktail bartenders both tend to like, strong enough to carry flavor through ice or vermouth without being a cask-strength workout.
For a debut Tennessee whiskey, building it from three mash bills suggests a blending-first approach rather than a single recipe dumped straight from a few barrels. That fits a company that has spent years running small batches and experimental releases out of its downtown still house.
Why "First Tennessee Whiskey" Is a Meaningful Phrase Here
Chattanooga Whiskey's catalog has leaned on its own whiskeys for years, so the "first Tennessee whiskey" label does not mean the company is new to distilling. It marks the first release the distillery has presented under the Tennessee whiskey category, with its charcoal mellowing step and its state-specific rules. For a Chattanooga producer, planting a flag in that category with a whiskey named after the city is a statement of identity as much as a product launch.
Why Maple Keeps Showing Up in Chattanooga's Barrels
This is not the distillery's first brush with maple. Its Barrel Finishing Series has already included a Michigan maple syrup cask finish, which arrived as the seventh release in that series. That whiskey, like Bad Chattanoogan, was aged more than four years and sold at a similar price point, around $59.99.
The difference is in what the maple is doing. A syrup cask finish relies on residual syrup soaked into a barrel's wood. The record finish uses toasted maple wood itself, plus the maple charcoal used during mellowing. Taken together, the two releases show a distillery mining one regional flavor theme from multiple directions, which is the kind of patient experimentation that tends to build credibility with enthusiasts.
A Craft Producer With Room to Experiment
Chattanooga Whiskey was founded in 2011, and its origin story is a political one. The company won the right to distill in Chattanooga for the first time in more than a century, after Tennessee's long hangover from Prohibition kept legal distilling out of most of the state's counties. That fight turned the brand into a local cause, and the company has kept the city at the center of its marketing ever since. A whiskey called Bad Chattanoogan, aged with songs about Chattanooga, is a straight line from that history.
The distillery has the recognition to back up a novelty release. It was named Craft Producer of the Year for 2026 by Whisky Magazine's Icons of Whisky, and its Experimental Distillery draws more than 50,000 visitors a year. That foot traffic matters. A visitor-heavy distillery can launch an offbeat product through its own tasting room, gauge the reaction in real time and turn a release party into word of mouth.
The Listening Party
The launch event itself followed that playbook. On Thursday, October 22, 2026, the Experimental Distillery hosted a 75-person listening party for the whiskey before its public release the following day. For a product whose packaging includes a playable record, a listening party is less a marketing flourish than the most obvious way to introduce it.
Where to Find It and What It Costs
Bad Chattanoogan went on sale Friday, October 23, at $64.99 per 750mL bottle. The distillery says limited quantities will reach Seelbachs.com and Tennessee retail stores in the coming weeks. With only 30 records used across both blends, the production run is tied to a small amount of finishing material, and buyers outside Tennessee should expect the online allocation to be the most realistic route.
At that price, the bottle sits in familiar territory for a four-year-plus, 100-proof craft whiskey with a special finish, a little above the distillery's maple syrup cask release. The hangtag record adds a collectible element without pushing the price into allocated-bottle territory.
Gimmick or Genuine Experiment?
Whiskey has no shortage of releases built on music partnerships, celebrity names and themed labels, and plenty of them amount to a familiar whiskey in a new outfit. Bad Chattanoogan is harder to dismiss because the theme and the process are the same thing. The records are toasted sugar maple, they sat in the barrel for a month, and the songs on them are the songs on the hangtag.
Whether the finish delivers a noticeable layer of toasted maple sweetness over the high-malt base is something drinkers will judge glass by glass. But the structure of the release, with two sides, one base whiskey and a fixed amount of wood, gives enthusiasts a rare chance to taste a controlled experiment and hear the soundtrack that came with it. For a distillery that built its name on fighting to make whiskey in its own city, it is a fitting way to put its first Tennessee whiskey on the record.
