Leiper’s Fork Distillery is bringing its small batch premium whiskeys to downtown Nashville in a big way.

The family-owned distillery will open a nearly 9,000-square-foot location at Nashville Yards in mid-2026. It will anchor the entire ground floor of an 18,500-square-foot, corten-steel-clad, two-story building that will sit on the west side of the Pinnacle Tower next to the historic rail lines.

“It is cementing our brand and our reputation in the state of Tennessee with existing consumers, but then also, exposing the brand to folks that are traveling to Nashville, and then going and turning those people into ambassadors,” Lee Kennedy, founder and distiller, told the Business Journal.

Leiper’s Fork Distillery is currently underway on an “embassy location” in downtown Franklin and had viewed Nashville expansion as a stop much further down the road. That is, until Nashville Yards developer Southwest Value Partners reached out to them about the opportunity in late summer 2024.

“The Pinnacle [venue] is anchoring that place, which is so awesome. Two of our biggest cultural exports from Tennessee are music and whiskey, so they wanted to have a distillery concept, but they didn’t want it to be a large national player. They wanted it to be a Tennessee distillery that didn’t have a presence, physically brick-and-mortar, in Nashville,” Kennedy said.

The distillery signed the lease a few weeks ago, falling in love with the space itself — overlooking the The Landing featuring a tiered amphitheater, dog park and open space poised to host classes, events, markets and more.

The grain-to-glass distillery will move its 500-gallon still, named “Ginger,”  to the Nashville Yards location with plans for meaningful distillation, facility tours and education on the history of distilling in Tennessee. They will replace it with a 1,000-gallon system at Leiper’s Fork, doubling capacity at the main campus.

“We want to be able to garner the attention of the tourism traffic in Nashville, but we also want to be a meaningful distillery, it’s adding capacity for us as a distillery in downtown Nashville, but then we’ll also have a cocktail bar that will feature our spirits that we make ourselves,” Kennedy said.

There will also be a restaurant component, but Kennedy is still in the process of identifying a food partner, with plans to have whiskey and dinner pairings and private tastings.

The Nashville Yards location will also have live music, building on its “Still House Sessions,” allowing artists to showcase their talents and potentially get discovered through songwriter rounds and more.

Production will run five days a week while front-of-house functions, like the restaurant and retail store, will be open six days a week.

“It’s taking all things that are Tennessee whiskey and music and good food and marrying that all together to give guests a unique experience,” Kennedy said.

The move also aligns with Leiper’s Fork Distillery’s commitment to organic growth. After filling its first barrel in 2016, Leiper’s Fork Distillery’s whiskeys are distributed in six states and the United Kingdom and it will soon have three physical locations.

“To expose our brand and to showcase what we’re doing, our authentic production and our authentic brand story to those people visiting Nashville, that’s invaluable for us,” Kennedy, who grew up in Nashville, said. “It helps us to gain distributors in other markets as we’re growing outside the state of Tennessee. It’s a great place to showcase what we’re doing.”

This is the third Williamson County-grown food-and-beverage tenant Southwest Value Partners has lured to Nashville Yards.

Culaccino will bring its scratch-made Italian fare to the development, and The Wine Bar, from the group behind Franklin’s Vintage Vine 100, will bring its sips.

“Leiper’s Fork Distillery at Nashville Yards will masterfully distill and showcase much of what we love about Nashville — friendship, whiskey, great bites and live music — in one incredible setting at some of the most uniquely beautiful architecture we have designed into Nashville Yards,” said Cary Mack, managing partner of Southwest Value Partners, in a release. “We are proud to welcome them and thrilled they will continue to build on their awesome history and Tennessee success story at our project.”

Read the full story from the Nashville Business Journal here.

Read the full press release here.