Leiper's Fork Distillery is taking its whiskey operation to downtown Nashville with a third location at Nashville Yards, targeting a mid-January 2027 opening.

The Williamson County distillery will occupy 7,200 square feet at 21 Platform Way S., with an additional 2,500 square feet downstairs, The Daily Pour reported. The space will include a full-service bar and restaurant, a working 250-gallon still, tours and tastings, a retail shop, private dining, event space and live music.

Owner Lee Kennedy, who founded the distillery in 2016 after spending three years working to change Williamson County law to allow commercial distilling, said Nashville Yards' developers approached him unprompted in July 2024.

Construction is underway.

"We could save ourselves a lot of money if we bought our grains from Cargill and bought our malt from BSG, but that's not the way I want to do things," Kennedy told The Daily Pour.

The distillery pulls its corn, rye and barley from Walnut Grove Farms in Schochoh, Kentucky, and Franklin-area farms River Bound and River Grange. Kennedy said the operation can track every bottle back to the field where the grain was grown.

Devin Walden will lead distillation at the new location. Walden previously served as master distiller at Big Machine Distillery and worked at Woodford Reserve. He will operate a still designed to match the original distillery's Scottish-style copper pot still, at half the size.

Chef Davis Reese will run the restaurant, which will lean Appalachian with a focus on local sourcing. Reese has worked at Arnold's Country Kitchen, Husk and Audrey, and co-founded Joyland alongside James Beard Award-winning chef Sean Brock.

The tasting room will be named for Samuel Claybrook Locke, a Locke family ancestor and Prohibition-era federal agent tied to the distillery's history.

Nashville Yards is a 19-acre downtown development that The Daily Pour described as Nashville's first open-container district.

The expansion marks a third location for the Kennedy family's operation. The original distillery sits on 27 acres on Southall Road outside the village of Leiper's Fork, where a 200-year-old log cabin serves as the tasting room. The second location, House of Spirits at 334 Main St. in downtown Franklin, features a bar, private tastings and a 50-gallon still.

The brand has earned international recognition. The UK's W Club, a membership program for whisky enthusiasts, voted Leiper's Fork Distillery its Whisky of the Year in 2024, according to Southern Exposure Magazine. Its bottles are stocked at London whiskey bars including Berry Bros. & Rudd and Milroy's of Soho.

No grand opening date or public preview has been announced beyond the mid-January 2027 target.