Today marks the one year anniversary of Short Mountain Distillery opening its doors to the public and three years since the hard work began to make this day possible.

It was an exciting three years serving an extraordinary team as Chief Operating Officer during this time. I could not have written the business plan or built a distillery around making moonshine without the help of Cannon County voters in 2010. Building a heritage brand image around local moonshine culture would have never been a reality beyond the law change without the commitment and support of Billy Kaufman and his brothers Ben and David.

I recently left the distillery in February to pursue a project I hope helps save the planet, but I thought it was important to take this opportunity to highlight some of the first year successes we achieved as a team. The captioned slideshow below really helps tell this story using hundreds of photos I took. Here’s to many more years of making our whiskey heritage shine to the world from Woodbury, Tennessee!

Short Mountain Distillery’s first year by the numbers:

• we created several local jobs and saw over 15,000 visitors at the distillery in Cannon County
• we launched two products: Short Mountain Shine and Short Mountain Apple Pie
• we sold over 2,500 cases of moonshine now available in stores across the state of Tennessee
• Short Mountain Shine (105 proof authentic Tennessee Moonshine) won the Gold Medal in the International Review of Spirits Award from the Beverage Testing Institute
• we appeared in over 100 media pieces, including a three-part Discovery Channel mini-series How Booze Built America
• we surpassed every industry consultant’s benchmark for success and helped ignite an American moonshine revival