From a Log Cabin in Leiper’s Fork to the Gulch: The Distillery That Rewrote a County’s Law Is Building a Nashville Home
A decade ago, there was no legal way to open a whiskey distillery in Williamson County. Lee Kennedy, who had built his first still as a teenager in his mother's basement, spent about three years changing that, and in 2016 Leiper's Fork Distillery opened on a rolling 27-acre property south of Franklin, with a tasting room in a log cabin roughly two centuries old. Now the distillery that had to rewrite a county's rules just to exist is coming to downtown Nashville.
What is being built at Nashville Yards
The new location is at 21 Platform Way South in Nashville Yards, the mixed-use district on the edge of the Gulch, near the rail lines and a short walk from Broadway. It will take a ground floor of more than 7,000 square feet, with additional space downstairs, and it is designed as a full working distillery rather than a branded bar. Plans call for:
- A working still producing whiskey on site, with tours
- A full-service restaurant and bar
- A tasting room, retail shop and private dining and event space
- A stage for live music
The opening, first floated for 2026, is now aimed at mid-January, so this is a story to bookmark for the new year rather than a place to visit this weekend.
A kitchen with a pedigree
The food side is led by culinary director Davis Reese, whose resume runs through some of Nashville's most familiar kitchens, including Arnold's Country Kitchen, Husk and Audrey, and who co-founded Joyland. The distilling will be run by master distiller Devin Walden, a Kentucky native who has worked at Woodford Reserve and Big Machine Distillery. Tours and education fall to Paul Bissett, a Scotsman, Royal Navy veteran and former whisky ambassador who has written nine books on the subject.
“Inefficient by design”
What sets the distillery apart is how stubbornly local it is. Rather than buying commodity grain and malt, Kennedy sources corn, rye and barley from nearby farms, including non-GMO corn grown specifically for the distillery, and has the barley malted at a small malt house instead of an industrial supplier. The company's own shorthand for this approach is “inefficient by design,” which is a polite way of saying it costs more and they do it anyway.
The recipes are traditional. The Tennessee whiskey is 70 percent corn, 15 percent rye and 15 percent malted barley, made by the sweet-mash method and charcoal-filtered in the Lincoln County Process that legally separates Tennessee whiskey from bourbon. A wheated bourbon and a rye round out the core lineup. The tasting room is named for Samuel Claybrook Locke, a Prohibition-era federal agent, which is a nicely ironic name to hang over a bar.
Why it matters downtown
Downtown Nashville has no shortage of places to drink whiskey. It has far fewer places where you can watch it being made, from grain to barrel, a few blocks from the honky-tonks. If you want a taste of the city's whiskey culture before January, this weekend's Nashville Whiskey Festival pours more than 100 of them on a Midtown rooftop, and our best restaurants in Nashville guide covers where to eat around it. Visitors planning a trip for the opening can compare hotels near the Gulch on our Book Your Stay page.
Image: illustrative, AI-generated – not the actual location.
