Heaven’s Door, Dylan Whiskey, to Open Nashville Distillery and Arts Center

Share This:

Rendering of the future Heaven’s Door Distillery and Center for the Arts

Heaven’s Door™ Spirits, developed in partnership with Bob Dylan, revealed April 9 its plans for the Heaven’s Door Distillery and Center for the Arts in downtown Nashville. The new center, slated to open in Fall 2020, will feature the Heaven’s Door craft distillery, complete with guided tours, a whiskey library, restaurant and a 360-seat live performance venue, all part of a renovation project to the 160-year-old Elm Street Church that will also display pieces of Dylan’s paintings and unique metalwork sculptures.

The announcement came on the 50th anniversary of the release of Dylan’s iconic album, Nashville Skyline.

“We’re thrilled to celebrate the anniversary of Nashville Skyline with our own addition to Music City’s skyline,” said Marc Bushala, CEO of Heaven’s Door Spirits. “Nashville is the natural home for the Heaven’s Door distillery and the Elm Street Church is a fitting home for Dylan’s visual artwork. We spent years looking for a property that truly captures the essence of the Heaven’s Door brand, and when we finally found the deconsecrated church in SoBro, we immediately knew that it would be the perfect physical and spiritual center for the brand, and Bob’s art.”

Nashville Skyline, Dylan’s ninth album, brought country rock music to the masses and is credited with changing the Nashville music scene forever. The album showed a new, more relaxed side of Dylan – beginning with its iconic cover photo, taken by Elliott Landy, of the artist smiling – which inspired an era of music revolving around storytelling, and changed the way people thought about country rock music.

Heaven’s Door‘s inaugural craft whiskeys include a Tennessee Straight Bourbon, a Double Barrel Whiskey, and a Straight Rye Whiskey finished in French cigar barrels from Vosges, France. In 2018, Heaven’s Door also introduced a limited-release 10-Year Tennessee Straight Bourbon.

Each of the brand’s three inaugural expressions has a direct tie to Tennessee – either through distillation, aging, barrel finishing or bottling. Tennessee boasts a long tradition of making great American whiskeys and its sweltering summers provides perfect conditions for barrel aging.