Post Modern Distilling, LLC

Post Modern Distilling is Knoxville's second craft distillery — a small-batch grain-to-glass operation founded in 2015 by Cameron Brown and a team of local Knoxville partners as a deliberate complement to the older Knox Whiskey Works operation a few blocks away. Located in the Old City district at 205 West Jackson Avenue in downtown Knoxville, Post Modern occupies a converted commercial space across from the Old City's restaurant-and-bar core, putting two of the city's three licensed distilleries within easy walking distance of each other for visitors building an Old City craft-spirits crawl.

The brand's editorial identity leans on the "post-modern" framing as a deliberate departure from traditional Tennessee whiskey conventions. Rather than positioning itself in the standard Tennessee bourbon or charcoal-mellowed Tennessee whiskey lanes, Post Modern's production approach emphasizes experimental cocktail spirits, gin and absinthe alongside the whiskey program, and a willingness to release non-standard mash bill experiments that fall outside the categorical norms most Tennessee distilleries cluster around. The result is a product range that drinks closer to a Portland or Brooklyn craft-cocktail distillery than to anything in the traditional Tennessee whiskey corridor.

The product range covers Post Modern Gin (a botanical-forward modern gin distinguished by the use of Appalachian-foraged botanicals), Post Modern Absinthe (one of the few American absinthes produced at meaningful volume in the Southeast), Post Modern Vodka, the small-batch Post Modern Bourbon program (still scaling up as the brand's aged-whiskey production reaches mature age statements), and a rotating range of seasonal cocktail-program spirits including coffee liqueurs, amari-style aperitifs, and limited barrel-finished bottlings. The on-site cocktail program at the Old City tasting room treats the distillery's range as the working palette for serious cocktail making rather than as standalone tasting samples — many of the limited spirits are produced specifically for cocktail program use rather than for retail bottling.

The Old City Knoxville visitor experience is one of the most cocktail-program-forward distillery stops in Tennessee craft spirits. Tours move through the production floor and into a tasting room and cocktail bar where the bartenders work through the full Post Modern range across multiple build styles — from spirit-forward stirred cocktails through batched and effervescent serves. The location's proximity to downtown Knoxville's restaurant scene and Market Square, walking distance from Knox Whiskey Works for a two-distillery Old City evening, makes Post Modern the natural cocktail-program complement to a city distillery scene that has otherwise focused on the more traditional whiskey side of Tennessee craft distilling.