You might notice a new player in the bourbon section of your favorite liquor store as Belle Meade Bourbon makes its long-awaited debut in Nashville this week. Its the brainchild of local brother team Charlie and Andy Nelson, two young entrepreneurs who are working to revive a long defunct brand. In the years before Prohibition, their great-great-great grandfather Charles Nelson ran the Green Brier Distillery near Nashville.
His descendants discovered that they had whiskey in their bloodline and decided to join in the wave of new whiskey distillers sweeping the spirits industry, launching Green Brier Distillery.
The Green Brier Whiskey brand was hugely popular in Tennessee and beyond before statewide Prohibition tolled in 1909. On a trip to visit a butcher in the town of Greenbrier in Robertson County, the Nelson boys and their dad drank from the spring that provided the water for their family's heritage brands.
Visiting the town's historical society, the younger Nelsons discovered two empty bottles of the old brand, and something clicked in their heads that they must try to bring back the old days.
Starting a distillery from scratch is a tall order, even if your family name is already associated with the industry. Picture calling a banker's office and asking for a loan based on this pitch: "We've never made any whiskey yet, but we'd like to borrow enough money to build a fairly substantial chemical engineering facility. Then we'll put our product in barrels in a dark barn for at least four or five years and hopefully we'll have something good to sell after that. So what do you think, Mr. Drysdale? Mr. Drysdale? Hello?"
The Nelson boys are sharp enough to realize that distilling is only part of making great whiskey. A major portion of the process is how you blend and finish the whiskey, and the boys have sought out an established distiller to help them out with the first release of Green Brier Distilling Co. They tasted and selected every barrel that went into the original edition, and then supervised the blending of their bourbon baby, which lies in repose somewhere in Kentucky. This is a very common practice and some of your favorite spirits are actually distilled somewhere other than where they are aged and bottled. (Cough, cough, Bulleit, cough.)
