Belle Meade Spirits

Belle Meade Bourbon is the heritage bourbon brand that brothers Andy and Charlie Nelson revived in 2011 — the modern relaunch of a Nashville bourbon brand originally produced by their great-great-great-grandfather Charles Nelson at the Nelson's Green Brier Distillery in Greenbrier, Tennessee starting in 1860. The original Belle Meade was one of the most successful pre-Prohibition bourbon brands in the country, and the Nelson family's modern revival is the bridge product that funded the rebuilding of the full Nelson's Green Brier Distillery operation a few years later.

The story behind the revival has become one of the most-told bourbon-industry narratives of the last decade. Andy and Charlie Nelson were teenagers in Nashville in the early 2000s when their father took them on a road trip to Greenbrier, Tennessee for what was supposed to be a butcher-shop errand. Outside the butcher shop, the brothers noticed a historical marker for the Nelson's Green Brier Distillery — and learned for the first time that their great-great-great-grandfather had run one of the largest pre-Prohibition American whiskey operations on the spot. Charles Nelson's distillery was producing nearly 380,000 gallons of whiskey per year by 1885 (outproducing Jack Daniel's at the time). Prohibition shuttered the operation in 1909; the family lost the business entirely.

Andy and Charlie spent the next decade rebuilding. The Belle Meade Bourbon line launched in 2011 as a sourced operation while the brothers raised capital and rebuilt the distillery, with releases including Belle Meade Bourbon (small batch), Belle Meade Single Barrel, Belle Meade Sherry Cask Finish, and Belle Meade XO Cognac Cask. The brand was acquired by Constellation Brands as part of the larger Nelson's Green Brier acquisition in 2019, and Constellation continues to operate the brand alongside the Nelson's Green Brier Tennessee whiskey program.

Today the Belle Meade label sits as the bourbon-side product family alongside the Nelson's Green Brier Tennessee whiskey-side, and the two are produced and bottled on the rebuilt Greenbrier campus. The brand identity references Belle Meade Plantation in West Nashville — a historic horse-breeding farm whose Belle Meade name was originally licensed for the bourbon by Charles Nelson in the 1860s — which gives the modern bottlings their distinctive horseshoe-and-equestrian visual identity that distinguishes Belle Meade from the Nelson's Green Brier sister brand on shelves and back-bars.