A family-owned distillery in Williamson County is opening a 7,000-plus-square-foot bar, restaurant and working distillery in one of downtown Nashville’s fastest-growing districts.
For many distilleries, efficiency, margins and profits are everything, especially in a time where Americans are drinking and buying less alcohol than they were a few years ago, and wallets have tightened across the industry. Franklin, Tennessee craft whiskey producer Leiper’s Fork Distillery is betting on the opposite approach.
“We could save ourselves a lot of money if we bought our grains from Cargill and bought our malt from BSG, but that’s not the way I want to do things,” Lee Kennedy, the distillery’s owner and chief distiller, told us on a sunny day in Franklin during a visit to the distillery and a couple of the farms its grains come from.
That stubborn refusal to compromise quality to save money — which the brand calls “inefficient by design” — is the throughline at Leiper’s Fork, and it is about to get a much bigger audience. The distillery is opening a new location at Nashville Yards, a 19-acre downtown development that will include four hotels with roughly 2,000 rooms, an indoor live music and event venue called The Pinnacle, bars and restaurants aplenty, shops and more…