Jeff Pennington

“Pivot to the Big Machine”

In Nashville, whiskey stories are often told as family sagas in time and oak, patience, and place. Jeff Pennington’s path fits the mold and breaks it at once. He was a Nashville-area kid who knew his future wife, Jenny, in high school; they were classmates at Franklin High. Years later, they reconnected, this time as adults working on opposite sides of the same liquor distribution business—rivals, yet friends.

Those distributor years taught the Penningtons the market’s rhythms as well as the faults that can follow when a young brand tries to grow faster than its barrels. Meanwhile, the state around them was changing. In 2009, Tennessee’s laws shifted, opening the door to a new generation of legal distilleries outside the long-established centers. The couple watched that door swing wide and made a decision: they would stop moving other people’s bottles and start filling their own.

Jeff and Jenny married, then quietly founded their distillery in 2011 in growing West Nashville. From the start, they cast their bet on grain, time, and Tennessee’s infamous but helpful-to-distillers heat and humidity. Their company would soon be known as Pennington Distilling Co., home to the Davidson Reserve line of Tennessee whiskey, bourbon, and rye, and it would collect astounding accolades along the way. But the critical ideas were present from the beginning: distill your own whiskey, use full-size 53-gallon barrels, and refuse the easy shortcut of a sourced release. Those choices meant cash tied up in rickhouses and years of waiting. It also meant that when their whiskey finally emerged, it would be theirs, start to finish.

And so it finally did: the first big public milestone came with Tennessee whiskey, a straight, four-year-old sour mash labeled Davidson Reserve Tennessee Whiskey. It hit the market in 2019, a bold statement that Pennington intended to be locally competitive in a category long dominated by a pair of legacy names from 100 miles south. Plus, Davidson Reserve used local grain at the center of its recipe in what was a Nashville whiskey, not just a whiskey from Nashville.

By 2020 and 2021, patience was paying off on judging sheets. Pennington Distilling earned multiple awards across major competitions, including Double Gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition for Davidson Reserve Tennessee Straight Sour Mash Whiskey, and a haul at the American Distilling Institute (ADI) and American Craft Spirits Association (ACSA) competitions. Among those recognitions, Davidson Reserve Four Grain was named “Best of Class” in the ADI Judging of Craft Spirits, while additional Davidson Reserve expressions took gold and silver medals at ACSA. The cluster of awards wasn’t marketing varnish; it was third-party confirmation that Pennington’s barrels had been speaking extremely well for themselves.

Jeff Pennington’s choices about how whiskey should be made—large barrels, time in wood, transparency about process—surface not just in medals, but in quiet details. Accounts from the period emphasize that he let whiskey rest until it was ready, resisted the early release of “young” spirit, and invested in a grain-to-glass identity that tied the label to Tennessee farms and a Nashville address. When a distiller with local buy-in is willing to wait, the whiskey can carry the weight of its place; Davidson Reserve’s range in bourbon, rye, Tennessee whiskey, and four-grain blends reads like a ledger of that edict.

But then a new chapter opened almost at once…

In December 2024, Big Machine Distillery announced it had acquired brands linked with the Penningtons, and Jeff was asked to join Big Machine’s leadership. For Pennington, the Big Machine partnership was more than new employment; it was a distilling home in quaint, nearby Lynnville, Tennessee, and Nashville, with an inviting, already visible whiskey footprint.

Big Machine’s whiskey identity is out in the open: tour copy that points visitors to the original Lynnville distillery, a commerce page lined with Borchetta Bourbon editions, and brand storytelling about heirloom corn and mashbills. For a career that began on the distribution side, went through a grain-to-glass start-up, and poured into award-winning bottles, the terrain should feel familiar: Tennessee grain, Tennessee warehouses, Tennessee whiskey. That continuity, and the idea that a distiller’s real biography is written in barrels, is the thread that ties Jeff Pennington’s work together. After all, a craftsman of whiskey knows that change is inevitable, but what matters is the line of intent that holds steady—in Jeff Pennington’s case, that line runs through Nashville and straight into a bottle of smooth Tennessee whiskey. 

Sources:

  1. Nashville Voyager, “Meet Jeff and Jenny Pennington…", nashvillevoyager.com, October 1, 2021

  2. Whiskeylore (podcast) Episode 29, “Jeff Pennington”, September 8, 2021

  3. Tennessee Crossroads (PBS), Season 34 Episode 36, pbs.org, April 29, 2021

  4. Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, “Pennington Distilling Company”,  May 23, 2021

  5. Straight Up 615, “First Tennessee Whiskey from Nashville’s Pennington Distilling Co.,” straightup615.com

  6. Craft Spirits Magazine, “Pennington Distilling Wins Awards at San Francisco World Spirits Competition,” craftspiritsmag.com, April 1, 2020

  7. MusicRow, “Big Machine Distillery Acquires Pickers Vodka”, Lorie Hollabaugh, December 17, 2024

  8. Big Machine Distillery/home, bigmachinedistillery.com

  9. Borchetta Bourbon/home, borchettabourbon.com

Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee