Alan Jackson's Silverbelly Whiskey Distillery and Museum Opens June 25 in Nashville — A Legacy Poured Into Every Bottle
Alan Jackson has spent more than three decades writing songs about the small pleasures and deep aches of American life — cold beer on a hot day, the smell of a dirt road at dusk, the weight of goodbye. Now, with his touring career drawing to a close and Nashville preparing for the farewell of a lifetime, Jackson is making his mark on Music City in a different kind of way: with glass, grain, and Tennessee whiskey.
Alan Jackson's new Silverbelly Whiskey Distillery and Museum in downtown Nashville is set to open June 25, celebrating the life and career of the country superstar and his Silverbelly Whiskey in a unique interactive setting. The timing is no accident. The Silverbelly Whiskey Distillery and Museum will open June 25 in downtown Nashville, just days before his June 27 touring finale at Nissan Stadium. For the man who once sang about going way down to the Chattahoochee, the symmetry feels intentional — one chapter closing, another opening.
The Address: Right in the Heart of It All
Located at 121 3rd Avenue South, the Silverbelly Whiskey Distillery will give visitors a first-of-its-kind experience as fans can sip whiskey while touring the country icon's museum. The location is not just convenient — it's a statement. The distillery and museum will be located at 121 3rd Avenue, just across the street from Lainey Wilson's Bell Bottoms Up bar and in the former home of Show Pony. This block of downtown Nashville has quietly become a corridor of country music commerce, and Jackson's new flagship fits right in.
Never before have people been able to sip whiskey while touring a country music icon's own museum just steps from Broadway. That's a claim worth sitting with. The honky-tonk mile along Lower Broadway draws millions of tourists each year, and virtually every corner has a bar, a boot shop, or a neon sign. But a functioning whiskey distillery fused with a career-spanning museum — where the person whose name is on the label is also the subject of the exhibition on the wall — is genuinely new ground. The dual-themed facility provides visitors with multiple ways to immerse themselves in Jackson's storied career, celebrating his music that's become part of the soundtrack of their lives, while also quenching their honky-tonk tastes with his Silverbelly Whiskey in an interactive setting that's never before been available.
Barrel to Bottle: What the Distillery Experience Actually Looks Like
This isn't a gift shop with a bottle on the shelf. The operational side of the Silverbelly Distillery is intended to be a genuine working facility, not a set piece. Silverbelly Whiskey will go from "barrel to bottle" at the new facility, giving visitors a firsthand view as the premium spirit is blended, proofed, bottled and labeled onsite. Watching whiskey bottled in real time is a rarer experience than most drinkers realize — many celebrity spirits brands simply source their product from large contract distilleries and slap a label on it, with no facility of their own. Silverbelly's approach here carves out a more authentic role.
Whiskey flights, cocktails, bottles for sale, and even a "bottle your own" experience are on tap at the new distillery, as well as live music. The "bottle your own" component is particularly compelling for collectors and whiskey enthusiasts. The ability to personally fill, cork, and label a bottle transforms what might otherwise be a passive tourism experience into something participatory — and considerably more memorable. For fans who couldn't score a ticket to the sold-out finale at Nissan Stadium, this becomes a worthy consolation and a meaningful souvenir of a singular moment in country music history.
The whiskey is distilled specifically for Jackson, but in quantities fans can purchase and enjoy. Anyone 21 years old or older can tour the museum, glass in hand. That last detail — glass in hand — is more than a hospitality amenity. It signals an atmosphere where the whiskey and the music aren't separated into different categories of the visit. They're meant to be experienced together, the way they've always existed in Jackson's world.
The Museum: Music, Stories, Legacy
The other half of this equation is the Alan Jackson Museum, built around the theme that his team has officially named "The Music, The Stories, The Legacy." With extensive displays and memorabilia, the museum is all about the defining pillars of the Country Music Hall of Fame member's life and career. Visitors will relive his journey from rural Newnan, Georgia to concert stages in such far-reaching places as Australia, Europe and South America, see how a paper sack full of cassettes and songs took him to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and be reminded how a self-professed "singer of simple songs" captured a nation's emotions in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.
That last line deserves elaboration. Jackson's post-9/11 anthem "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" remains one of the most emotionally resonant songs ever written in response to a national tragedy — a quiet, conversational meditation on grief and community that stood apart from more overtly patriotic responses of the era. For a museum built on the premise of telling stories, giving that song its proper weight will be essential.
The museum component, built around the theme "The Music, The Stories, The Legacy," will include memorabilia and displays tracing Jackson's career. Visitors will walk through the musician's life and career, from rural Newnan, Georgia, to some of the world's largest stages. The arc of that journey — from a small Georgia town to stadiums on multiple continents — is the kind of American story that doesn't need embellishment. Jackson arrived in Nashville with his songs in a paper bag and left his mark on nearly every corner of the genre.
Jackson's longtime manager Debbie Doebler articulated the purpose of the museum plainly. "For over four decades, Alan has had an amazing career where his music has told stories of his life, creating the foundation of the legacy that we're excited to share with his fans," Doebler said in a release. Doebler also noted that the museum will present a new way for the country music legend to connect with his fans long after he steps off the road. That last point may be the most important one. Jackson is done touring. The road that gave his music its texture and his fans their memories is now closed. What the museum offers is a permanent place for that connection to live — a structure built to hold a relationship between an artist and an audience that stretches back more than thirty years.
Silverbelly: The Brand Behind the Building
To understand what this distillery represents, you need to understand where Silverbelly the whiskey brand came from and where it's been heading. In 2022, Silverbelly Whiskey was announced as a nod to the color of Jackson's iconic cowboy hat. Country Music Hall of Fame member Alan Jackson introduced Silverbelly Whiskey as a premium spirit distilled exclusively for — and hand-selected by — the country superstar. The cowboy hat connection is more than marketing shorthand. That silverbelly-colored hat has been as inseparable from Jackson's image as his baritone voice or his straight-backed traditionalism. Making it the name and identity of a whiskey brand is a branding move that actually makes sense in context.
The brand's release strategy is equally distinctive. Silverbelly is uniquely labeled by "Chart Number" instead of a typical batch number. Every batch of Silverbelly produced will represent one of Alan Jackson's number-one hits, in chronological order, starting with his first number-one song from 1990, "Here in the Real World." That approach turns a whiskey collection into a musical timeline — fans who buy each sequential release are essentially building a discography in their liquor cabinet.
The whiskey itself has matured considerably since those early days. Silverbelly initially sourced very youthful bourbon from Green River Distilling. While Green River supplies very good whiskey, it's difficult to get overly excited about bourbon matured for 2.5 years. The brand's team recognized that and made a significant pivot. In early 2023, following Batch 3, Silverbelly shifted away from Green River to an undisclosed distillery in Tennessee that isn't George Dickel. As Silverbelly Whiskey moved away from the early days of sourcing immature Green River, the brand transitioned to two bottles of bourbon distilled in Tennessee, both with more than four years of aging in Tennessee. That shift from young, sourced Kentucky bourbon to properly aged Tennessee whiskey signals a brand serious about building credibility beyond celebrity novelty.
Silverbelly Bourbon Batch number four was the brand's first release following the transition to bourbon distilled in Tennessee. Silverbelly produced 1,500 cases of this Tennessee debut with at least four years of age. The decision to label it "I'd Love You All Over Again" — named after Jackson's first chart-topper — was a clever way of marking the restart: a new whiskey, a returning to roots, and a nod to the song that started it all.
The Family Business: Mattie Jackson Joins as Master Blender
Perhaps the most intriguing development in the Silverbelly story isn't the distillery itself — it's who's helping make the whiskey. In January 2025, it was announced that Alan's oldest daughter, Mattie Jackson, was joining the family business as the Master Blender. While Mattie's name is likely new to most spirits enthusiasts, she is a Certified Bourbon Professional via The Council of Whiskey Masters and a Level 2 sommelier. That's a legitimate credential set, not a celebrity-adjacent title. Mattie brings years of wine and spirits industry expertise to Silverbelly as both a Certified Bourbon Professional and Certified Sommelier.
Having a trained, credentialed blender in the family who can carry the brand forward gives Silverbelly a continuity that many celebrity whiskey labels lack. Most celebrity-backed spirits collapse or get sold off within a few years of their launch because the celebrity loses interest or the brand never develops its own identity beyond the famous face. Silverbelly appears to be building something more deliberate — a distillery with a permanent Nashville home, a family member overseeing the liquid, and a museum to anchor the brand's story to a place visitors can actually walk into.
The "Last Call" Release: Whiskey Meets the Farewell Tour
Silverbelly has made a habit of tying its limited releases to moments in Jackson's career, and the latest entry is the most emotionally loaded of them all. Silverbelly Whiskey's newest addition to their award-winning lineup is the "Last Call" offering, celebrating country music icon Alan Jackson's October birthday. The brand's 2025 allocated release, priced at $75, features a minimum 6.7-year-old straight bourbon whiskey — a nod to Alan's 67th birthday — coming in at 101.7 proof, to commemorate his day of birth: October 17.
"Last Call" is available in an extremely limited release of 1,958 bottles — matching the year Jackson was born — at silverbellywhiskey.com and in select markets across the country, including Tennessee, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, and Florida. The numerology here is dense and intentional: the proof, the age, the bottle count, the birth year. It's the kind of obsessive detail that serious collectors notice and reward with purchases.
Critics have generally found the whiskey pleasant but calibrated toward accessibility rather than complexity. Overall, Silverbelly Last Call is a good bourbon that should please a broad range of drinkers. Nothing about it feels harsh or unrefined, though more experienced whiskey fans might wish for a touch more oak presence and spice, especially given the 29% rye content. While the sweetness is well-handled, the profile leans a bit too gentle at times. With only 1,958 bottles produced, this release is clearly intended for Alan Jackson's admirers, and on that front it succeeds. Fans will find plenty to enjoy — and perhaps a gateway into exploring other bourbons. For seasoned enthusiasts, however, the $75 price tag may give pause, as bottles offering greater complexity can be found in the same range. That's a fair assessment, but it also slightly misses the point. The "Last Call" bottle is as much a collectible as it is a dram — a numbered artifact of a specific cultural moment, priced and packaged accordingly.
Jackson's Nashville Business Empire: More Than a Label Deal
The distillery and museum are the most ambitious Nashville venture Jackson has launched, but they're not his first. In addition to his accomplishments in music, Jackson has proven himself to be a multifaceted businessman. In 2016, he founded AJ's Good Time Bar in downtown Nashville. That bar, planted along the Broadway honky-tonk strip near the Ryman Auditorium, has been a fixture of the tourist corridor for years. The distillery represents a significant escalation — from a bar bearing his name to a fully operational production facility and cultural institution.
The CEO of Silverbelly, Robbie Goldsmith, framed the new facility with the kind of confidence the moment calls for. "We couldn't be more excited to bring Alan Jackson's local, Tennessee-made Silverbelly Whiskey to downtown Nashville," Goldsmith said. "This is a truly unique setting and opportunity for people to get into the 'spirit' of what country music and Music City are all about." It's a calculated play on the word "spirit," but also a genuine argument: Nashville's tourism economy runs on music and food and drink, and the Silverbelly Distillery is designed to operate at the intersection of all three.
Tickets to the museum can be purchased in advance at alanjacksonmuseum.com — a smart move that allows the operation to manage visitor flow while also building a database of fans who might not otherwise have a direct relationship with the Silverbelly brand.
The Final Show: Last Call at Nissan Stadium
The distillery opening on June 25 serves as the curtain-raiser for what promises to be one of the most significant country music events in years. On June 27, Country Music Hall of Famer Alan Jackson celebrates "Last Call: One More for the Road — The Finale," presented by Edward Jones and Silverbelly Whiskey, with the country icon's final full-length concert of his career at Nissan Stadium in Nashville.
In addition to the more than 50,000 people who'll fill the field and stands, an all-star lineup of artists will join Jackson to celebrate his career and legacy. Luke Bryan, Eric Church, Luke Combs, Riley Green, Cody Johnson, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Jake Owen, Jon Pardi, Thomas Rhett, George Strait, Carrie Underwood, Lainey Wilson, and Lee Ann Womack will all perform at the event, along with Adam Wright, Big City Brian Wright, and Carlisle Wright.
The inclusion of George Strait carries particular weight. Strait, the uncontested King of Country Music with over 100 million RIAA certifications and more than 60 major industry awards, has a decades-long history with Jackson. The two Country Music Hall of Fame members have recorded together, toured together, and shared some of the most memorable moments in CMA Awards history, including a stunning duet of "He Stopped Loving Her Today" following the passing of George Jones in 2013, and a medley of "Remember When" and "Troubadour" at the CMA's 50th anniversary.
Their first collaboration came back in 2000 upon the release of "Murder on Music Row," a protest against the Nashville machine, which ended up winning the pair two CMA Awards — Music Event of the Year in 2000 and Song of the Year in 2001. For two artists so closely associated with traditional country music's resistance to pop crossover, performing together one final time feels like a closing of a very specific loop in the genre's history.
Jackson himself explained the choice of venue in terms that reflect the way he's always thought about his craft and his roots. "We just felt like we had to end it all where it all started for me, and that's in Nashville — Music City — where country music lives," Jackson said.
The concert is sold out, but the CMA Theater will stream the concert live on Saturday, June 27, free and open to the public. That detail matters: Jackson's final performance won't be locked behind a paywall for those who couldn't get tickets. It's a generous gesture that fits the artist's image, a man who has always positioned himself as accessible, unpretentious, and fundamentally of the people who fill his shows.
Jackson previously shared that he would be stepping back from touring as he continues living with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurological condition that has affected his mobility and made touring more challenging in recent years. He has never made his diagnosis the centerpiece of his public statements, but the knowledge of it gives the farewell a poignancy that goes beyond the ordinary retirement announcement. Every performance in recent years has carried the weight of finality, and June 27 brings that chapter to its close.
What This Means for Nashville's Whiskey Scene
Nashville has become a significant destination for American whiskey tourism, with several notable distilleries operating in and around the city. The addition of a celebrity-backed, museum-integrated facility in the heart of the tourist district is a notable development — not just for its novelty, but for what it signals about the direction of experiential whiskey tourism.
The "barrel to bottle" model, where visitors observe real production activity rather than a staged demonstration, anchors the experience in authenticity. The whiskey on site will go from "barrel to bottle," giving fans an inside look at the blending, proofing, and bottling of the spirit. Combined with the ability to bottle your own dram, the Silverbelly operation is designed to create a tactile, hands-on relationship between visitor and product that translates directly into brand loyalty and word-of-mouth promotion.
Silverbelly Whiskey combines two American traditions — whiskey and country music — to create a spirit worthy of honoring Jackson's historic career. That sentence sounds like marketing copy, but in the case of the Silverbelly Distillery and Museum, it's also an accurate description of the physical space being built. Country music and American whiskey have been intertwined for as long as there have been honky-tonks. What Jackson and his team have done is literalize that relationship — put a still and a stage in the same building, a bottle and a photograph in the same room — and made it into something you can walk through.
The Bigger Picture: What Comes After the Road
Jackson's farewell isn't a disappearance. While Jackson has made it clear that this will be his final full-length concert performance, he has not ruled out future music. In recent interviews, the Country Music Hall of Fame member has said he continues to write songs and remains hopeful about releasing new material in the future. A man who has built his entire identity around songwriting doesn't simply stop because he stops touring.
The distillery and museum are, in some ways, the physical infrastructure for the next phase of his public life. Where the road once connected him to fans city by city, the museum creates a fixed point — a place in Nashville where his story is told in full, where his whiskey is made and poured, where the music plays and the memorabilia stands as evidence of what one career from Newnan, Georgia, to the world's biggest stages actually looks like up close.
The Georgia native is one of the best-selling artists of all time, having sold over 75 million records worldwide, and 44 million sold in the United States alone. He has earned two Grammy Awards, 16 CMA Awards, and 17 ACM Awards, among countless others. Those numbers don't tell the whole story — no numbers do — but they frame the scale of what's being memorialized in the museum's display cases and what's being celebrated with every pour of Silverbelly in the tasting room downstairs.
June 25 is a Wednesday, two days before the final show. Between those two dates, the visitors who walk through 121 3rd Avenue South will find something that Nashville doesn't offer anywhere else: the chance to hold a glass of the man's whiskey, look at the artifacts of his life, and sit for a minute inside a career that shaped American music for four decades. That's not a bad way to spend an afternoon before the lights go down at Nissan Stadium one last time.
