Written and photographed by MAGGIE KIMBERL
CARVING OUT a NICHE at LEIPER’S FORK B
uilding a distillery from the ground up is hard enough. It’s incredibly capital-intensive, and if your focus is whiskey, you won’t see returns for years. Survival is a matter of cranking out as much product as you can with the capital you have available to you, often starting with unaged spirits, or at least minimally aged spirits, to pay the bills. But what happens when you start a distillery in a place that never had a distillery before and the local government caps your annual production? That’s exactly what happened at Tennessee’s
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Leiper’s Fork Distillery, and they are thriving despite the limitations being imposed on them. “I’ve always had a fascination with distilling from a cultural heritage standpoint, going back to when I was really a teenager,” Leiper’s Fork founder Lee Kennedy said. “It’s always captured my imagination that the folks from Scotland and Ireland came over to the New World across the Atlantic Ocean, a lot of times with stills and the know-how of how to distill, and came to Virginia and then over
into Kentucky or North Carolina over into Tennessee, and they brought that know-how with them that was woven into their cultural fabric. What also captured my imagination was what we call the backwoods chemistry of distilling. In the Middle Ages, spirits production was in the realm of magic. Tennessee has had a rich heritage with distilling, but we’ve had a pretty complicated relationship with whiskey production.” Kennedy explained that in the 1896 census, there were 322 distilleries in Tennessee alone, but that by 1910 the state had enacted its own Prohibition, 11 years before the rest of the nation. The state then kept that going until 1937, so while the rest of the country dealt with national Prohibition for 13 years, Tennessee dealt with it for 27. This gave rise to a deeply-rooted bootlegging and moonshining culture within the state, and by the time the state Prohibition was repealed, it only allowed for distilling in Moore County, Lincoln County, and Coffee County. The other 92 counties did not allow distilling again until 2009.
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