Yazoo Brewing Company started from a homebrewer’s dream – Linus Hall’s love for making (and drinking) craft beer soon led him to open Nashville’s first production brewery since Prohibition. We opened our doors in October 2003 in the historic Marathon Motor Works building, and started by self-distributing kegs of Pale Ale, Dos Perros, Spring Wheat, and Onward Stout to local bars and restaurants, and we fortunately gained an enthusiastic local following. We quickly replaced the Spring Wheat with the now popular and award-winning Hefeweizen, and we started bottling our beer in 2005. Other local favorites like the Sly Rye Porter and our Hop Project IPA rounded out the line-up of beers. In 2009, Yazoo managed to brew Tennessee’s first ever legal high-gravity ale, SUE, our smoked porter and homage to the South’s proclivity to smoke all kinds of foods. In 2010, Yazoo moved to The Gulch, now one of Nashville’s most active neighborhoods. This allowed us to add a new 40-barrel brewhouse and room to produce more beer, which helped build our year-round lineup to 10!
In the summer of 2012 Yazoo began a series of sour and wild beers with local brewer/writer Brandon Jones called the Embrace The Funk series. Titled with Brandon’s popular sour beer website, this line of Yazoo beers explores the many wonderful beers that can be produced with wild yeasts, souring microbes and different wooden casks.
In December 2012 our Brewmaster Linus and “Wrangler of Funk” Brandon released the first beer in the series named “Wild Child”. Since then the “Embrace The Funk” series has been a staple in the Yazoo Taproom with special rotating offerings. Our ETF beers have been served at SAVOR in New York, “What The Funk” in Denver and on January 26th, 2014 the first bottles of ETF “Deux Rouges” were released (and sold out in 2 hours). Linus and Brandon are constantly creating new beers and different barrel variations for the Embrace The Funk series. The beers are mostly taproom exclusives so your best bet to enjoy their creations is to stop by soon!
We continued to grow enough that in early 2018, Linus Hall announced plans to move the Taproom and Brewery to a brand new 6.5 acre campus north of downtown – but not until Summer/Fall 2019!
Yazoo continues to be an independently owned and operated brewery – Linus and Lila Hall maintain 100% ownership and direction of the brewery, and you can frequently find Linus tinkering with something in the production facility 5-7 days a week!
