Xul Beer Co. (East Nashville, formerly Southern Grist)

The taproom at 754 Douglas Avenue carries a decade of Nashville brewing history, though not quite in the way most accounts tell it. Southern Grist Brewing started in February 2016 as a 430-square-foot operation from Kevin Antoon, Jared Welch and Jamie Lee — but at a different East Nashville address, on Porter Road. The Douglas Avenue building came later; the owners bought it in 2021. In between, Southern Grist became one of the city's most respected producers of hazy IPAs and fruited sours. Then, in February 2026, Knoxville's Xul Beer Co. purchased the business outright, and both Nashville taprooms now trade under the Xul name. Welch stayed on to run Nashville brewing operations, and Southern Grist beer continues in what Xul describes as a limited capacity. Welch's own framing of it is the fair one: it is not that the heart of what Southern Grist is has stopped, it is more of an evolutionary process. The room is genuinely good — a roomy wraparound bar, two patios, and Lauter serving chef-driven comfort food alongside the pours. It opens at noon most days and eleven at weekends.

We owe readers a correction here, and it is the reason this listing has been downgraded. This page previously recommended Southern Grist's Oasis, a 0.0% hop water brewed with Citra and Motueka, and its CBD Oasis variant carrying 20mg of LabCanna CBD. Both were real products, but they were never sold at this taproom — the brewery's own shop listing restricted them to the Nations location in West Nashville, and we simply attached them to the wrong address. Worse, neither now appears anywhere on either taproom's current tap list, and the old web shop that sold them has been abandoned, its domain redirecting to an unrelated site. The East Nashville list we can see today runs twenty-five beers, every one between 4.4% and 8.5% ABV, with no alcohol-free option printed on it. That does not prove nothing is available — taprooms often keep canned non-alcoholic beer that never reaches the board — but we cannot claim what we cannot see. Ring ahead if the alcohol-free option is the reason you are going.