Corsair Distillery

Corsair Distillery is the East Nashville craft operation that's spent 17 years pushing the boundaries of what American whiskey production can include — and the distillery whose founder literally wrote the book on experimental American distilling. Founded in 2008 by childhood friends Darek Bell and Andrew Webber in Bowling Green, Kentucky (then moved to Nashville's East Nashville neighborhood in 2010), Corsair has become the de facto reference operation for craft American distillers who want to do things other than standard Kentucky bourbon. Bell's 2013 book "Alt Whiskeys" — covering smoked grains, alternative grains, hopped whiskey, and similar non-traditional production approaches — is one of the most-cited works in the craft American distilling community.

The product range is genuinely unusual. Corsair Triple Smoke uses three smoked grains (beechwood-smoked malt, cherrywood-smoked malt, peat-smoked malt) to produce a single-malt American whiskey that drinks closer to Islay than to anything in Tennessee. Corsair Quinoa Whiskey uses quinoa as the secondary grain alongside malted barley. Corsair Ryemageddon is a heavily-hopped rye whiskey. Beyond the whiskey range, Corsair produces gin (the Corsair Spiced Gin uses a 16-botanical recipe), absinthe (one of the few American absinthes made on a traditional Alembic still), and a small range of finished and limited releases that rotate through the year.

The East Nashville location at 601 Merritt Avenue puts the distillery in the heart of one of Nashville's most concentrated bar and restaurant neighborhoods, and the on-site tasting room and small cocktail bar have become an established stop on Nashville's craft-beverage map. The distillery hosts regular release events, distillery dinners with local restaurants, and limited-edition single-cask programs that draw both local Nashville foot traffic and out-of-town craft-whiskey collectors.

The Marathon Village location at 1200 Clinton Street — the original Nashville distillery footprint — remains in operation alongside the East Nashville site, giving Corsair two visitor-accessible locations in Nashville. For visitors building a Nashville craft-whiskey day that combines Corsair with Nelson's Green Brier (Greenbrier, just north of Nashville), Pennington (Nashville), and Belle Meade (West Nashville), Corsair anchors the experimental end of the city's distilling identity — the producer most explicitly committed to making whiskey that isn't trying to compete with anyone else's whiskey.