Memphis’s brewery scene is built on three things: a state alcohol code that only loosened up in the past decade, a supply of cheap old warehouse space near Downtown and Midtown, and a handful of breweries that opened between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s and simply stayed open. It is a small, young scene compared with cities like Asheville or Denver, and it did not happen by accident — it happened once the law allowed it.
Why did Memphis have almost no craft breweries until recently?
Tennessee regulates alcohol through a three-tier system — producer, distributor, retailer — enforced by the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC). For decades that system, combined with a low legal cap on the alcohol content of beer sold at retail, made stronger or more experimental beer hard to sell without routing it through liquor stores as “high gravity” product. The state raised that retail cap in the mid-2010s, which is the single biggest reason Memphis’s brewery count grew when it did rather than twenty years earlier. Details of what breweries and bars can currently sell, and how self-distribution limits work, are covered on this site’s guide to Tennessee’s alcohol laws in practice.
Where are Memphis’s breweries actually located?
They cluster in a specific kind of building: former industrial and warehouse space on the edge of Downtown and in inner Midtown, not standalone bars in high-traffic entertainment strips like Beale Street. That is a function of zoning, ceiling height, floor drainage and rent — the same reasons a district like the Edge District or Broad Avenue Arts District also picked up galleries and studios in the same period. Cooper-Young, a residential-commercial district south of Midtown, holds one of the city’s longest-running taprooms in a former retail building rather than a warehouse, which is closer to what happened in similar neighborhoods nationally as breweries moved into whatever building had the bones for tanks and a bar.
Binghampton, east of Midtown, is the other notable cluster point, largely because of the redevelopment around Crosstown Concourse — the former Sears, Roebuck and Co. distribution and retail building, vacant for decades before its conversion into a mixed-use building with offices, a school, a clinic and food and drink space. A brewery locating near that redevelopment is following the same logic as the rest of the tenant mix: large floor plates, high ceilings, and a building the neighborhood had already organized around reusing rather than demolishing.
Which breweries define the current Memphis scene?
None of this is a ranking — it is a description of which breweries are established enough to appear consistently in local reporting, industry directories and the breweries’ own public information. A short, non-exhaustive list of the names that recur:
- Wiseacre Brewing Company — founded by twin brothers Davin and Kellan Bartosch, with a production facility and taproom near the Edge District, close to Sun Studio.
- Memphis Made Brewing — a Cooper-Young taproom and one of the older continuously operating craft breweries in the city.
- Ghost River Brewing — a Downtown brewery whose name refers to the underground aquifer that supplies much of Memphis’s water, a detail the brewery uses in its own materials.
- High Cotton Brewing Company — one of the earlier modern Memphis craft breweries, operating a taproom near Downtown.
- Crosstown Brewing Company — a brewery associated with the Crosstown Concourse redevelopment in Binghampton.
Readers wanting current hours, tour schedules or seasonal releases should check each brewery’s own site rather than relying on this list, since taprooms change hours and lineups far faster than a reference article can track.
How does the brewery scene connect to Memphis’s wider food and drink identity?
It sits alongside, not inside, the city’s better-known food story. Memphis is defined internationally by barbecue, dry rub and the specific traditions covered elsewhere on this site — see what a dry rub is and why Memphis is known for it and how Memphis barbecue differs from other regional styles — and breweries in Memphis often function as an adjunct to that scene rather than a rival to it: a taproom near a barbecue joint, a brewery pouring at Memphis in May’s barbecue contest, a can on the shelf at a soul food counter. The city’s broader food and drink coverage treats brewing as one strand of a much larger picture rather than the center of it.
Does the brewery calendar follow the city’s festival calendar?
Largely yes. Memphis’s brewery visibility rises around events that already draw crowds Downtown and in the parks — Memphis in May’s barbecue and music programming being the largest — because breweries pour at those events rather than because the events are built around beer. Outside festival season, taprooms run on their own weekly rhythm, typically busier on weekends, and several close or reduce hours on Mondays, a pattern common to small food and drink businesses across the city.
What should a visitor actually expect from a brewery visit here?
A small taproom, not a beer hall district. Memphis has nothing resembling Munich’s beer gardens or a dense downtown brewpub row — a visitor planning around breweries should expect to drive or use rideshare between two or three taprooms spread across Cooper-Young, the Edge District and Binghampton, since they are not walkable to one another. Anyone building a day around this should check the practicalities covered in Access Memphis’s guide to getting around and planning a visit before assuming a walking route will work.
What does the brewery scene tell a resident about how the city actually runs?
It is a reasonable small window into how Memphis redevelops itself: not through a masterplan for a “brewery district,” but through individual operators taking a chance on a specific vacant building — a former warehouse, a former Sears distribution center, a former retail storefront — once state law made the product legal to sell at scale. That is the same pattern behind the reuse of buildings across Memphis’s neighborhoods more broadly, and it is worth reading alongside this site’s guide to living in Memphis, which covers how the city’s older industrial stock keeps getting repurposed rather than replaced.
Where can you check current, reliable information?
For hours, tour availability and current beer lists, each brewery’s own site is the only source that stays accurate. For the regulatory backbone — what breweries in Tennessee are legally allowed to sell on-site, and how self-distribution works — the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission’s own published rules are the relevant authority, and this site’s explainer on Tennessee alcohol laws in practice summarizes how that plays out day to day in Memph
Access Memphis is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favourites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.
Featured image: Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D., source, CC BY-SA 3.0
