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 resum…