A Tour of Knoxville’s Craft Breweries
Story by Caroline Williams | Photography by Ashley Box & Ethan Smith
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 4 (July/August 2026)
I am not a beer person. Or at least, I didn’t think I was. I came into this assignment the way most people walk into a brewery for the first time: a little unsure, a little curious, hoping I’d find something that didn’t taste like the bottom of a lawn mower bag. What I found instead was something I wasn’t expecting. Six places where real people pour real pieces of themselves into every single pint. Where the guy cleaning tanks at six in the morning is the same guy grinning at you from across the bar at four in the afternoon. Where a jar of leftover tahini becomes a beer, and a stack of oatmeal cream pies becomes a stout.
Knoxville’s craft beer scene has quietly become one of the most vibrant in the South. There are now more than twenty breweries within walking distance of each other downtown alone. This summer, I sat down with the people behind six of them and got an education in barley, hops, yeast, and the strange, beautiful alchemy that turns all three into something worth raising a glass to.
Pull up a stool. Let me take you with me.
Crafty Bastard Brewery The Place Where Everyone’s Welcome
The first thing I notice when I pull into Crafty Bastard’s West Knoxville location is that it doesn’t look like what I’d imagined. A little divey, a little open, the kind of place that feels lived in. The second thing I notice is Cliff Crocker, the brew master, who has the easy energy of a man who has absolutely nowhere else he’d rather be.
Cliff didn’t follow a straight path into brewing. He came out of an industrial kitchen background, became a fan first, wandering around Knoxville’s craft taprooms on his own time, and then heard there was a school in town offering a brewing certificate. The Brewing and Distilling Center, run by a man everyone calls Doc White, changed the trajectory of his life. He enrolled, got certified, met the owner of Crafty Bastard, and was offered a job fast.
The brewery’s name has a story as colorful as its beer list. The original owner, Aaron McLean, operated on his own wavelength. One day a friend called him a crafty bastard. He wrote it down and never let it go. Ten years and over 900 recipes later, the name fits like a glove.
I am drinking a pineapple tahini ale when Cliff starts explaining what makes this place different. He came up with the recipe because he had leftover pineapple beer and found a jar of tahini in the kitchen. “I was like, you know, let’s do it,” he tells me, with the casual confidence of someone who has stopped being surprised by his own good ideas. The beer is bright and strange and oddly wonderful, like a summer afternoon you didn’t plan. That willingness to grab whatever’s interesting and see what happens is Crafty Bastard’s whole personality.
But it’s not all pineapple tahini. The most popular beer at this west location is the Crispy Boy, a light lager written specifically for the West Knoxville crowd: people walking in saying they only drink Miller Lite or Bud Light. “So we wrote this recipe to be the answer to that question,” Cliff says. It worked. The Crispy Boy is now the official beer of the Knoxville Ice Bears and the Bijou Theatre. Downtown, the IPA called Tessellation outsells everything else by a mile.
Walking through the brew house with Cliff feels like a science class you actually want to attend. The big system holds 550 gallons. Brew days start at six in the morning and run ten to twelve hours: bags of barley, pH balancing, a recirculation process named after some long-dead German, an hour and a half of boiling, and somewhere in all of it, a hibiscus IPA made with 30 pounds of flowers that sold out in under a month.
“You’d be surprised at how much everyone assumes that you brew every day,” Cliff tells me. “Most of it is just cleaning.” He says it with a laugh, but he means it. The romance of craft brewing, it turns out, runs on a whole lot of elbow grease. That part doesn’t make the Instagram posts.
The weekend before my visit, a local band called Smooth Sailor played the outdoor stage. Seven hundred people showed up. The line to the bar was out the door all night. They did $14,000 in sales. For the love of the game, Cliff says, and I believe him completely.
Abridged Beer Company Where the Food Is Half the Story
Zach Young didn’t set out to run a brewery. He was living in Colorado, giving guitar lessons to his boss’s son in exchange for six-packs of craft beer. A home brew kit with his brother in Chicago sealed the deal. He’s been at Abridged Beer Company in Bearden for seven years, working his way up from cleaning kegs to Director of Brewing Operations. The name comes from owner Jesse whittling years of home brewing
experiments down to the recipes he loved most, the abridged version of his trials and tribulations.
Abridged is one of the few places in Knoxville where the food program is genuinely as strong as the beer. Zach is unapologetic about it. I find out why the moment the Bridge Burger arrives: brussels sprout petals, crispy bacon, caramelized onions, all of it nestled into a sweet brioche bun. It is, without question, one of the better bites I have all summer. There’s also the Oak Room, a separate taproom with a date-night energy, where craft cocktails, oak-aged beers, spirits, and wine share the menu alongside some of the more ambitious brews the team produces.
The most popular beer at the main location is Topping Rock, a hazy IPA — juicy, tropical, not bitter — named as a play on Rocky Top. At the Parkside location, it’s the Rifleman Light Lager, easy and cold and exactly what you want after a long day. A couple is getting married here next Sunday. They had their first date inside this taproom. It’s that kind of place.
Pretentious Beer Co. A Brewery Run by an Artist
Matthew Cummings has a master’s in glass sculpture and has been blowing glass since 2004. He started home brewing as a research project, to better understand the chemistry behind the beer glasses he was designing, and told his wife about it in the middle of a crowded tapas restaurant on a Friday night. She was not initially thrilled.
Pretentious Beer Co. is tucked into a space in Old City where everything from the bar stools to the tap handles to the lights was made by hand. The name came from a bottle share club at an art center in Louisville, where Matthew made bespoke tailored beer glasses for his friends, who dissolved into giggles and declared the whole thing gloriously pretentious. He’s been leaning into the joke ever since, and making very serious beer underneath it.
“We don’t take ourselves seriously,” he tells me. “We take what we do very seriously.” That split is the whole place.
Matthew’s most popular beer is Chug Life, a Czech Pilsner and their only true flagship, the one beer they’ve made consistently since the beginning. His other bestseller is Squishy, a wild cherry sour made by melting actual pounds of gummy bears into the fermentation. The name is ridiculous on purpose. The beer tastes exactly like what you think it tastes like, and people lose their minds over it. The most experimental beer he’s ever made? A lemon, seaweed, and squid ink sour for Halloween. It was black. Someone asked him to bring it back over a year later, and he’d forgotten it existed entirely.
What sets Pretentious apart most visibly is that the brew house and the tap room are the same room. On brew days the equipment expands into the space where you’re sitting, and somehow it works.
“Six breweries. Six very different stories. One lesson repeated over and over: the best beer is never really about the beer.”
There’s also a garden out back with hop vines, mint he’s let run wild because he’s from Kentucky and can’t quit mint juleps, lavender by the door that brushes against you as you enter, and a black walnut tree that is almost certainly the largest tree within half a mile of downtown. The back patio pulls you off the streets of Old City and makes you feel like you’ve wandered into someone’s backyard, tucked away among the greenery and a long way from anywhere loud.
Xul Beer Company Built to Scale
Brad West co-founded Xul in 2020 with business partners Tara and Seth Thacker. His path there started with a subscription box in the mail, a trip to New York where he fell hard for a brewery up there, and eventually the decision to build something of his own. The name is part Ghostbusters villain, part Diablo character, part Urban Dictionary rabbit hole. People mispronounce it constantly, but it’s just Xul, like tool with a Z. By almost any easure, it’s the largest operation I visit, with multiple taprooms in Knoxville and a growing Nashville presence. Last year they produced 7,500 barrels of beer. This year they’re hoping to hit 15,000.
The engine behind all of that is a peanut butter and jelly sour called PB&J Mixtape. Brad didn’t see it coming and neither did anyone else. They started making it around 2022 and it has grown exponentially ever since, now distributed across more than a dozen states and shipped internationally to Europe, China, Japan, and Australia. It is, Brad says with a straight face, deliberately marketed to people who don’t like beer. It’s now in Neyland Stadium, and every place that sells alcohol inside that stadium will pour a PB&J Mixtape this fall.
I try it. The first thing that hits is the nose: a full, warm waft of peanut butter before the can even reaches my lips. The sip that follows is lighter than you’d expect, slightly sweet, and somehow tastes exactly like the sandwich it promises. I immediately understand the phenomenon.
But there’s more to Xul than one viral product. Their hazy IPA, Paper Crowns, won a gold medal at the World Beer Cup in 2022. And coming soon: a barrel-aged stout collaboration with Side Project Brewing out of St. Louis and Other Half Brewing out of New York, finished with vanilla beans, caviar, and black truffles. They’re calling it Gourmand. They expect it to sell out in weeks.
Peaceful Side Brewery A Reflection of Where You Are
Maryville doesn’t feel like a brewery town, and then you walk into Peaceful Side and immediately understand that it absolutely is.
Chris Meadows got his start volunteering at Sweetwater Brewing Company in Atlanta for free beer, worked his way up through the cellar and brew house, and eventually landed in Knoxville, helping open Elkmont Exchange, then Yee-Haw, before getting a call from the people behind Peaceful Side asking him to run their Maryville facility. He said yes immediately.
The name comes from Townsend, where Peaceful Side Social first opened. Townsend is the peaceful side of the Smokies. On the other side of that mountain is Sevierville, Gatlinburg, and Pigeon Forge. Chris calls it “Panama City in the mountains.”
What Chris makes here feels like it belongs to the land around it, light and refreshing when it’s boating weather, darker and richer when people are hunkering down. Their One for Each Hand, a pina colada-style sour seltzer, is so popular they cannot brew it fast enough. I taste it fresh from the tank, still days away from being packaged, and even unfinished it is outrageously good. Sweet, tropical, dangerously drinkable.
Chris teaches part-time at the Brewing and Distilling Center, the same school Cliff Crocker attended. His philosophy on consistency is the most precise thing anyone says to me all summer: “Anybody can make beer. Making the same batch consistently, month to month, season to season — that’s where the real skill is.”
Almost twenty years in, Chris Meadows still gets up every morning wanting to come in. Sitting in the taproom after the tour, cold Mexican lager in hand, it’s easy to understand why.
Yee-Haw Brewing The Big Stage
If the other five breweries I visit feel like intimate conversations, Yee-Haw feels like a main event.
The Knoxville taproom is enormous: 62 taps, a full kitchen known for spicy chicken tenders, a jumbotron, a beer garden with fire pits, an outdoor bar, and an amphitheater built for large concerts. The day before I sit down with head brewer Trevor Daniels, an engineering school graduate, they hosted goat yoga on the property. Bachelor and Bachelorette watch parties routinely pack the place. UT game days are an event unto themselves.
Trevor brings the science: precision, process, a genuine love for what happens when all the variables line up. What Yee-Haw has built is something rare, a brewery that holds an intimate Tuesday evening just as gracefully as a thousand-person Saturday night. Show up on the right night and you might find yourself watching a concert under the Tennessee sky with a cold pint in hand, wondering how you ever spent a summer any other way.
Last Call
Here is what I know now that I didn’t know before: the people making beer in this city are not doing it for the money, although they’d like the money, and the margins are tight, and the cleaning never stops. They’re doing it because somewhere along the way, the transformation got them. Grain into sugar. Sugar into alcohol. A theory on paper into something cold and alive in a glass.
They all said some version of the same thing. Cliff Crocker said it warms the heart, watching people enjoy something he made. Matthew Cummings said he hopes people slow down for ten seconds and be mindful. Chris Meadows said he wants people to feel happy without feeling like it took effort. They work together too, borrowing ingredients, sharing tank space, because there’s more than enough thirst in this city to go around.
I came in not a beer person. I leave someone who knows that a pineapple tahini ale exists, that 30 pounds of hibiscus flowers can turn a beer the color of a sunset, and that a peanut butter and jelly sour can end up in Neyland Stadium.
Go find your glass. Knoxville has earned it. ◆
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