What It’s Like to Drink at the World’s Longest Bar

It turns out that running the World’s Longest Bar (officially!) comes with a long list of challenges.

“Managing a bar of this size and with this kind of structure is challenging because it’s not just the length of it, it’s the design of it,” admits Keith Weaver, founder of Humble Baron, the record-setting bar within Tennessee’s Nearest Green Distillery — which is also home to Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, founded by Keith’s wife, Fawn.

The stats are incredible: The winding 518-foot bar counter wraps around a 20,000-square-foot room. It features 17 stations and 202 bar stools. 

And it’s not just a bar for showcasing Uncle Nearest products. You can find creative drinks from a number of spirits brands here, many of them Black-owned. Humble Baron also serves as a restaurant and a music venue. As part of the concept, the venue tapped James Beard nominee, Chef G. Garvin, of LowCountry Restaurants in Atlanta, to curate its menu of sophisticated Southern fare. For its cocktail program, the distillery partnered with Gin & Luck, the hospitality group behind cocktail institution Death & Co.

As for music, the indoor and outdoor stages were designed by the former technical director and engineer for Prince’s Paisley Park. The indoor stage, separated by a glass garage door from its mirroring outdoor stage, will potentially allow live concerts hosting more than 15,000 guests — but don’t worry, as the bar itself on most nights comfortably maxes out at about 200-300 people.

If you’re not familiar with the distillery, here’s a quick history lesson: Uncle Nearest is inspired by the first African-American master distiller on record, Nearest Green, who is credited with teaching Jack Daniel the art of whiskey making. It’s the fastest-growing American whiskey brand of all time and it keeps winning — deservedly — pretty much all the major spirits awards. 

Uncle Nearest Is the Most Important Story in American Whiskey History

How a 19th-century slave’s legacy is shaping one of today’s most award-winning spirits

So Uncle Nearest is a very important story, one that’s been told, and worth hearing again if you do the distillery tour, which is absolutely recommended. But what gets left out of the narrative is that the Uncle Nearest team — Fawn and Keith Weaver especially — are having a lot of fun building out their company.

And the Humble Baron is a major part of that. When I visited the distillery just before opening day in 2019, Fawn mentioned the concept of having the world’s longest bar. I’m not sure I took that claim seriously, but four years later, I was able to experience a night out there, have a few drinks and walk the length of the bar top — which…took a while. 

We spoke with Keith about Humble Baron’s not-so-humble ambitions and the obstacles the bar faced during its four-year build:

When you’re this ambitious in your build, a lot of things can go wrong — even when there isn’t a pandemic. Were there issues?

“You name it,” says Weaver. “Just one example: We had a steel shortage and the price of steel went up dramatically. So the cost factor changed, and it affected everything from the building to the equipment behind the bar and in the kitchen.”

And then there was the design itself. “Part of [the complications] was that I didn’t want the bar to be ordinary,” he adds, noting that the bar itself winds around the room and there aren’t really any straight lines or familiar shapes (“That would have been easier and faster and far less expensive — we were measuring twice to cut once.”)

The certification for “world’s longest bar” is a process

It turns out a person from the Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t just come out with a plaque. “They actually send over a person to verify,” says Weaver. “They have a surveyor, like you use for a land survey, come and survey the bar.” And the certification process itself was actually all driven by technology. “It’s not a guy with a measuring tape.”  

Thankfully, Humble Baron was certified on the exact day it opened, March 23, 2023. And if you know anything about Uncle Nearest, they are very much about dates and numbers (23, as Weaver points out, is Michael Jordan’s number).

The music programming is purposely eclectic

“I’m a person with an interesting playlist,” says Weaver. “My Spotify — I don’t think algorithms can really predict who I am. Am I a young teenage girl or an old white man?” That dynamic taste is reflected in the bar’s music lineup, which includes many local acts and ranges from gospel to country to urban to (on the night we were there) a legitimately great rock cover band. 

The very long bar is a challenge for the staff, too

“Operating within it — and around it — has been challenging from a labor perspective,” says Weaver, who notes that getting food and drink around a 20,000+ square-foot venue is a task. As well, “It’s the world’s longest bar, and it’s not the world’s smallest kitchen but … the kitchen is definitely too small for all the ambitions we have.” 

There are contingencies if the world record is ever broken

“It wouldn’t be that hard to expand,” adds Weaver. “On either side of the stage there are two windows/garage doors that don’t function as garage doors. You could pop those up and continue the bar around the space. And there’s abundant land back there. It goes on for 432 acres, so we could go pretty far.”

That said, Humble Baron team is in no rush to expand. Says Weaver: “Hopefully, we don’t have to think about or do such things for a while.”

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And finally, we were able to take a cocktail class while we are at Humble Baron, where we put together The Queen’s Gambit, one of the first cocktails DeAndre Jackson, Humble Baron Beverage Manager, crafted for Uncle Nearest Master Blender Victoria Eady Butler. Jackson married Uncle Nearest 1856 with two other Black-owned spirits, Sorel Liqueur and Hella Cocktail Co., as well as some of Butler’s favorite ingredients like pineapple and citrus.

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