Nelson's Green Brier

Nelson's Green Brier Distillery is the Nashville-area operation that brothers Andy and Charlie Nelson rebuilt from the historical site of their great-great-great-grandfather's pre-Prohibition distillery — making it one of the most direct heritage-revival projects in American whiskey, and one of the few modern Tennessee distilleries restoring a brand that was, in its original era, larger than Jack Daniel's. The original Nelson's Green Brier Distillery operated in Greenbrier, Tennessee (~30 minutes north of Nashville) from the 1860s through 1909, when Tennessee state prohibition shut it down. Charles Nelson, the founder, was at the time producing roughly 380,000 gallons of whiskey per year — significantly more than the Jack Daniel's operation at the same time — under the Nelson's Tennessee Whiskey and Belle Meade Bourbon brands.

The family lost the business entirely to Prohibition and the post-Prohibition consolidation, and the original Greenbrier distillery site sat empty for over 100 years. The modern revival started in 2009 when Andy and Charlie Nelson, then in their early 20s, discovered the family history during a Greenbrier road trip with their father — encountering a historical marker for the original distillery they had no idea existed. The brothers spent the next several years raising capital, sourcing bourbon (which became the Belle Meade Bourbon line launched in 2011), and rebuilding the distillery infrastructure on the original Greenbrier campus. Distillation resumed in 2014, ending a 105-year gap in operation.

The Tennessee whiskey program — the centerpiece of the post-2014 production — uses the original Nelson family yeast strain (preserved by family members and verified through fermentation testing), the standard Tennessee whiskey corn-rye-malt mash bill, and the Lincoln County Process charcoal mellowing that legally distinguishes Tennessee whiskey from bourbon. Single-barrel, small-batch, and bottled-in-bond expressions of Nelson's Green Brier Tennessee Whiskey now anchor the production-side product range, with Belle Meade Bourbon (sourced bourbon, sister brand) covering the bourbon-side.

Constellation Brands acquired Nelson's Green Brier in 2019, providing the distribution and marketing capital to scale the operation nationally without losing the family-run operating identity — Andy and Charlie Nelson remain on as the brand's public faces and operating leadership. The Greenbrier campus visitor experience includes the rebuilt distillery, the original distillery site (preserved as a historical exhibit), and a small museum tracking the Nelson family history and the pre-Prohibition American whiskey trade. The location 30 minutes north of Nashville makes it a natural Saturday-afternoon addition to a Nashville-area distillery day.