Brushy Mountain Distillery LLC

Brushy Mountain Distillery is the world's first legal prison distillery — a moonshine and whiskey operation that opened in July 2017 inside the Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, nine years after the facility closed as Tennessee's most notorious maximum-security prison. The setting is genuinely unprecedented in the global spirits industry: Brushy Mountain operated from 1896 to 2008 as Tennessee's first maximum-security prison, holding the state's most violent murderers, robbers, and rapists for over a century, with some inmates serving sentences of 200 years or more. James Earl Ray, the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was held at Brushy Mountain and famously escaped from the facility in 1977 before being recaptured 54 hours later in the surrounding Cumberland Mountains.

The prison closed in 2008, and the historic property sat empty until a private development group acquired the campus and began converting the buildings for adaptive reuse as a tourism, retail, and event destination. The distillery opened in July 2017 as the End of the Line Moonshine operation — a name that references the prison's geographic remoteness in Morgan County's deep coal-country mountains, and the cultural reality that being sent to Brushy Mountain was historically considered the end of the line for an inmate's criminal career. The branding through the visitor experience leans into the prison history rather than away from it: tours move through restored cellblocks, the original prison chapel, and execution-related areas alongside the working distillery floor.

The product range covers the End of the Line moonshine line (10 unique flavors including traditional unaged corn whiskey, apple pie, peach cobbler, and the cult-favorite Brimstone hot-cinnamon variant), Frozen Head Vodka (named for the surrounding Frozen Head State Park mountain range), Brushy Mountain Double Barrel Whiskey, Brushy Mountain Copperhead (an aged amber expression), and Struggle Bus Bloody Mary mixers. The distillation uses pot stills on-site in a converted prison work-shop building, with aging in new charred American oak barrels stored in the original prison warehouse spaces.

The Petros visitor experience combines a working distillery tour with a full Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary tour — visitors who buy combo tickets get the prison-history tour through restored cellblocks and inmate areas alongside the distillery tour and tasting room. The location is genuinely remote — roughly an hour west of Knoxville in deep Morgan County coal country — and the surrounding Cumberland Plateau setting makes the visit a natural full-day destination rather than a quick stop. It's the most editorially distinct distillery in Tennessee craft spirits and one of the only American distilleries where the location's history is more compelling than the spirits being produced inside it.