Short Mountain Distillery

Short Mountain Distillery is the Cannon County, Tennessee operation that legitimized one of the most authentically rural Appalachian moonshining lineages in modern Tennessee craft distilling — and one of the few licensed distilleries where the family's pre-legal moonshining heritage is operationally connected to the legal production happening today. Founded in 2010 by Billy Kaufman and family on the family's 400-acre farm in Woodbury, Tennessee (Cannon County, roughly an hour southeast of Nashville), Short Mountain was among the earliest small craft Tennessee distilleries to open under the 2009 state law that legalized small-batch licensed distilling. The Kaufman family had operated illegal moonshine stills on the same Cannon County land for multiple generations before going legal — a heritage Billy Kaufman has documented in interviews and on-site programming as part of the brand's editorial identity. The transition from illegal to legal production preserved both the family's traditional recipes (the unaged Short Mountain Shine line uses recipes from the family's pre-legal era) and the regional Cannon County moonshining identity (a small but historically significant Appalachian distilling region distinct from East Tennessee's better-known Smoky Mountains tradition). The product range covers the traditional Short Mountain Shine moonshine (100 proof, unaged corn whiskey using the family recipe), the aged Short Mountain Tennessee Whiskey (charcoal-mellowed per the Tennessee wh…