The Halls and Yazoo are in their third location after starting at Marathon Motor Works and The Gulch.
-- Photograph ProvidedIn the early 2000s, when she was tending bar on Lower Broadway, Kristen Gumto remembers Yazoo Brewing Company founder Linus Hall slipping in to service his tap and refill stock. Back then, a local craft beer was a novelty next to the typical draft offerings of Coors Light, Bud Light, Miller Light, and perhaps a European ale like Heineken.
“Those were the early days of trying to convince the Coors Light crowd that it was OK to drink local microbrewed beer,” Gumto recalls. “They weren’t used to it at all.”
Before he left, Hall would often purchase a round for the house. He had only one request of the staff: Tell the patrons they were drinking Yazoo beer.
“He didn’t want any recognition,” Gumto says. “He wasn’t that kind of guy. He would just buy a round for anyone who would drink a Yazoo beer and quietly take off.”
Hall is still the same low-key figure he was 20 years ago when he and wife/co-owner Lila Hall launched Yazoo, named for the river that runs past their hometown of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
But Linus is far from complacent about maintaining Yazoo’s position. Change has been a constant for Tennessee’s second-largest production brewery by volume, with demand for craft beer growing as fast as Yazoo could brew for most of those 20 years.
Now, from Yazoo’s third home in Madison, Hall faces industry headwinds that include lingering effects of the pandemic, the closing of many independent restaurants that fueled Yazoo’s early growth, and increased competition for tap and shelf space from brewers who followed in Yazoo’s wake.
“Craft beer had a nice almost 20-year run where there was no downturn,” Hall says. “We’re seeing a flattening now and maybe a little downturn. And it’s fine. It’ll just make everybody sharpen their pencils, work harder and put out a better product and do a better job of managing their businesses.”
Yazoo was built around recipes that Linus Hall, a trained engineer, developed in a basement still and a business plan he crafted as a Vanderbilt executive MBA student. Lila Hall handles back-office functions like HR, accounting and payroll, in addition to utilizing her art and museum background as a creative force behind packaging and visual presentation.
The company has outgrown two locations since its launch in October 2003: a rundown corner of the old Marathon Motor Works and, from 2010 to 2019, a taproom and production facility in the heart of The Gulch that proved a fortuitous investment.
Yazoo’s third home – and likely last, at least under the Halls’ ownership – sits on a six-acre campus overlooking the Cumberland River in an industrial part of Madison. The purchase and build out of the spacious taproom, patio, and brewhouse with floor space to triple current production capacity of 20,000 to 22,000 barrels a year opened in July 2019 and was funded by the sale of the Gulch property. And there’s room to add a separate new warehouse for Yazoo’s Embrace the Funk line of wild and sour beers, currently produced in rented space by the airport.
There’s no foot traffic at all here, in contrast to the teeming Gulch, and no signage directing visitors off Myatt Drive. Yet the taproom, which will host events every day during the Craft Brewers Conference, draws a steady stream of patrons, some with children in tow, and by 6 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, even with a light rain falling, the parking lot was almost full.
“Ever since we started, there’s been an interesting dynamic between the taproom and the brewery,” Hall says. “We view our taproom as the best marketing you can do. We didn’t try to turn it into our main source of revenue. You can actually sit down with somebody, pour them a pint and talk about the beer. They might not come back again for six months or a year, but if they had a good experience here, they’ll probably buy your beer when they see the item in the stores.”
Yazoo sells most of its volume in-state and distributes to only half a dozen other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Mississippi, and limited markets in South Carolina and Indiana. In Madison, not only is there room to grow production but there’s far easier truck and interstate access for distribution than the Gulch property.
In building out the new space, Hall also invested in a canning line that could keep up with demand for cans, which is growing in its main market of Middle Tennessee and increasingly requested by distributors in new markets. Distributors are also driving production of new styles.
“They might already have 10 IPAs, but maybe they don’t have a great hefeweizen. And they’ll say, ‘Hey, y’all make a great this or that, and we can find a lot of avenues to sell that beer.’ Whereas, if you’re trying to compete with everybody else’s styles that are already there, you might get lost in the shuffle,” Hall says.
“When we first started, we only had about four year-round beers, but it seems the pace of coming up with new things has definitely increased. It’s gotten a whole lot more competitive.”
The pandemic delivered a seismic shock to the industry. In early 2020 the Yazoo taproom became a pickup point for to-go orders and the staff delivered beer to homes. Later that year the taproom reopened with lower seating capacity. Everybody at Yazoo stayed employed, a beertender notes. But packaging brewers like Yazoo, which had at least 50% of its volume in draft, were hit hard.
“A lot of that was focused on downtown Nashville. So when all that shut down, almost half our business went away overnight,” Hall recalls. “The tourism side of it just fell off a cliff, and while it’s come back, for us and other craft brewers in town that segment still hasn’t gotten back to where it was. A lot of places cut down on their selection and focused on some bigger national brands and a lot of sponsorship-driven stuff.
“I mean, we’re fine. We’ve been around for a while. But a lot of the old restaurants that we’d been serving for a long time didn’t make it and the churn of that has been hard. And like everything else, all of our inputs have gone up dramatically in price. Inflation has been tough and competition has been tough.”
Now in their fifties, the Halls are starting to think about a succession plan for Yazoo Brewing Company. With one child in college and the other close to it, they’d like to travel more. But for the moment, they’re savoring Yazoo Brewing’s 20th year as a trailblazer in Tennessee craft brewing. All year Yazoo is releasing monthly collaborations with favorite breweries like Calfkiller of Sparta and Nashville’s Smith & Lentz, culminating this fall in festivities at the taproom.
Much like Linus Hall, the celebration will be low-key.
“We’ve never been one to rent out Nissan Stadium and have, you know, Tim McGraw or somebody like that play,” Hall says.
“We’re just going to have some bands and beer and food and have a party up here.”