Jack Daniel's and Taxes

[Godstilla]

I recently visited the Jack Daniel Distillery. When they are running they crank out 70 gallons a minute of 140 proof. Uncle Sam takes a whopping $1.4 million in a taxes every 24 hours of production. Unreal!!!!! GM better thank Jack Daniel's for the bailout money.

[Fourway]

I recently visited the Jack Daniel Distillery. When they are running they crank out 70 gallons a minute of 140 proof. Uncle Sam takes a whopping $1.4 million in a taxes every 24 hours of production. Unreal!!!!! GM better thank Jack Daniel's for the bailout money.

It's really not that much money considering what JD is taking in...
The TTB charges by the "Proof Gallon" or by the gallon of %50 alcohol.
So if they are doing 70 gallons of %70 per minute that's 98 proof gallons per minute.
There's 1440 minutes in a day, so that's 141,120 proof gallons in a 24 hour period.
So according to your JD tour guide they are paying $9.92 per proof gallon.
Now each proof gallon they produce represents 6.3 bottles of their end product (remember they dropped their proof from 90 to 80 a while back)...
so by their figures they are paying out $1.57 per bottle in taxes.
Some quick internet research shows the price of a bottle of basic JD black label at about 27 bucks retail... so conservatively lets say they get half of that (ignoring that they pay the same $1.57 on a $50 bottle of Gentleman Jack)....
That gives us $13.50 per bottle wholesale.
that means that the 70 gallons per minute of 140 proof represents $8334.90 per minute. (or just a little over half a million an hour)
Which means that in a 24 hour period the first 2.8 hours go to the federal government and the remaining 21.2 hours (10.6 million dollars) is Jack's to keep.

As far as GM goes... its really the depressed laid off auto workers spending their unemployment checks on whiskey to ease the pain of sliding into financial ruin who are paying to bail them out.

[Hack]

Which means that in a 24 hour period the first 2.8 hours go to the federal government and the remaining 21.2 hours (10.6 million dollars) is Jack's to keep.

Now the real question is how much does Jack get to keep after subtracting overhead and production costs? Much less than 10.6 million I'm sure, but I'm also sure it's nothing to sneeze at.

[Fourway]

Well... based on Jack Daniels parent company Brown-Forman's posted numbers... in very broad strokes, rounded up or down to the nearest to the nearest hundred million or so....
Brown-Forman does somewhere in the area of 3.5 billion a year in revenue of which it claims 500 million (half a billion) is profit...
Which means they are in the neighborhood of %15 profit.

If JD which appears to account for roughly a billion of Brown-Forman's 3.5 billion in sales per year sticks to the same formula then Jack Daniels is generating 150 million a year in profit.
Or to look at it another way, Jack Daniels looks to be shipping around 12.5 million proof gallons a year which at 98 proof gallons a minute means 88 24 hour production days. or about 1.7 million in profit per day.
So that 70 gallon per minute of 140 proof spirit coming out of their factory is making them $1,180 a minute.

It's important though not to confuse the profits a corporation claims with actual wealth generated.
Those numbers are liable to be much higher.
For example, the CEO of Brown-forman was compensated 3.7 million in 2008, lots of folks are getting very rich as part of the pre profit operating expenses.
When you look at it that way the TTB is sucking hind tit to get the approximately 20 million a year in taxes they get out of JD.