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 cellbloc…