I guess you really don’t identify flavors until somebody educates you.” “It’s not beer-don’t quote that-it’s a flavored water. “And I have not had a Miller Lite in six years,” he continues. “Now, I can’t even drink a beer without analyzing the characteristics, like you would a good dish by a chef,” Jones says. Morse, then heading the Cool Springs Brewery, took on Jones and his mass-produced-beer-loving palate as a personal challenge. The latter was how Jones met his eventual business partner and brewmaster, Derrick Morse. “There’s significant reluctance to do anything from a state level with anything related to alcohol.” So, that’s where the idea remained: just an idea.ĭuring this dormant period, Jones was getting snubbed by wine snobs and laughed out of a craft brewery for drinking a Miller Lite. “And I laughed,” Johnston, who is now in his 23rd year at the school, says. Johnston was in a meeting with his then-new MTSU provost, who informed Johnston about his plans to begin a brewing program. in grape and wine production from the University of Arkansas. While the plans for Hop Springs have been five years in the works, the start of its story began 10 years ago, with a mild-manner professor named Tony Johnston, who holds a Ph.D. ![]() Don’t quote this,” he says, dryly, with full expectation that I will, “but this is Arrington on steroids.” “I love talking to my wife, but give me a game. “I’ve always enjoyed Arrington, but I get bored to tears,” Jones says, with a laugh. Hop Springs, to paraphrase Hubert Selby, Jr., will be a “brewery-and,” or a place you visit to do other things, and, while you’re there, have a few beers. Its centerpiece, a massive brewery shared by his company Life Is Brewing’s three labels ( Mantra the yearling Steel Barrel and the new Humulus Project), will annually produce a maximum 150,000 barrels, or, in layman’s terms, 4.65 million gallons.īut it’s not just another brewery-in Nashville’s city limits there are already 15, with more in neighboring towns. The property, a former cow pasture, will be a destination brewery with a strong educational component, working hand-in-glove with nearby Middle Tennessee State University. The Hop Springs project is Jones’ brainchild, and its scope dwarfs any other operation like it in Middle Tennessee.Ī large-scale landscape architect by trade, he says, “This is a culmination of all those ideas.” Summer movie nights with a giant projection screen. An amphitheatre over there that will host both local and national acts. ![]() And, here, after damming the sliver of spring-fed creek that bisects the property, a five-acre pond. Over there, a disc golf course designed by world-class athletes. ![]() Listening to him talk about it, I can see it, too. “I can see it finished from day one-don’t ask me how,” Jones says, eyes hid by wrap-around sunglasses. ![]() In the distance, a perimeter of trees lines the 83-acre property, and, in the mid-ground, thickets of blackberry bushes show tufts of green. The wind bends the tawny marsh grasses below. Once the ear-ringing subsides, it’s peaceful. We crest the rise, and he cuts the engine. But, after a week of heavy spring rains, this is the only method of getting down to the manmade peninsula that looks out over the back half of the Hop Springs property in Murfreesboro. Sitting on the sideboard of a bulldozer as it rolls across muddy red clay, I’m practically grabbing the machine’s operator, Mark Jones, trying to hold on.
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