Ole Smoky Distillery and Yee-Haw Brewing Co. are opening a joint retail and hospitality venue in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on May 20, extending a co-branded route-to-market model that has already proven itself in Tennessee tourist corridors. The combined tasting room and taproom format puts both suppliers under one roof, pairing Ole Smoky's moonshine and whiskey SKUs alongside Yee-Haw's craft beer lineup in a single on-premise destination designed to capture high-footfall coastal tourism traffic.
The Myrtle Beach location represents a meaningful expansion of the two brands' shared brick-and-mortar strategy beyond their home state. Ole Smoky, which operates multiple distillery experience sites across Tennessee — including flagship locations in Gatlinburg and Nashville — has used direct-to-consumer retail venues as a key demand-generation engine, driving trial and depletions that ripple downstream through its three-tier wholesaler network. Layering Yee-Haw's draft and packaged beer offering into the same footprint expands per-visit ring and broadens the addressable consumer occasion.
For Yee-Haw, the South Carolina opening marks a continued push into off-premise and on-premise markets outside its Johnson City, Tenn., home base. The brewery has been scaling its distribution footprint across the Southeast, and a high-visibility tourism venue in one of the region's busiest beach markets provides a cost-effective trial mechanism that can seed pull-through demand for wholesaler-distributed packaged formats — cases and six-packs — at nearby off-premise accounts. Live music programming and an entertainment-forward positioning are intended to sustain repeat visitation beyond the initial tourist draw, supporting longer-term on-premise volume.
The joint-venue model itself is worth watching as a supply-chain and commercial template. By co-locating a licensed distillery experience with a brewery taproom, both brands share occupancy and operational overhead while cross-merchandising to each other's consumer base. South Carolina's regulatory environment for distillery retail and on-premise pouring has become increasingly accommodating, reducing barriers to the kind of DTC tasting-room model that Ole Smoky has refined over more than a decade. Operators in the spirits and craft beer segments tracking spirits manufacturing trends and craft beer distribution will note the format as a scalable playbook for tourism-market activation.
No financial terms or volume targets for the Myrtle Beach location were disclosed in the announcement. Industry observers will be watching depletion data from the South Carolina market over the next two to three quarters to gauge how effectively the venue converts tourist trial into sustained wholesale velocity across the state's distributor network.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
