On the third day of Nashville, I acted like a true millenial and ate/drank my way through Nashville culture. Since starting my job with the Tillsonburg Cultural Improvement Alliance and Oxford Tourism (did I tell you I’ll be working on the Oxford Cheese Trail?) I’ve become fascinated with culinary tourism. I digress.
Our day started with a trip to Third Man Records where I recorded Elton John’s Your Song directly onto clear vinyl in the “Record Your Own Vinyl” record booth. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, you may have seen it featured on this amazing Apple commercial (which I cried at). Anyways, I put my ukulele skills to the test for the first time and although they aren’t quite where I’d like them to be, I think it went ok! If you are in Nashville for the first time, I highly recommend doing just that. It’s fun and you have a great souvenir to take home.
We spent a good chunk of the day bumming around East Nashville, where I’ve decided I’d like to take up residency. We visited loads of shops and devoured hot dogs at I Dream of Weenie where I tried “southern chow chow”- some kind of relish that was delicious. For supper, we went to a great Mexican restaurant called Rosepepper where it again looked like I didn’t touch my food and yet looked pregnant afterwards. It was tastey and a new Nashville favourite for sure. As if that wasn’t enough, we went for cake pops at Nashville Sweets where I was amazed at how beautiful their cakes were!
We ended our day with a tour of Yazoo Brewery- Nashville’s biggest craft brewery and home to a brew house that holds forty barrels with room to spare! They were generous with the samples which never hurts on a tour. The brewery was founded in 2003 by brewmaster Linus Hall who actually started brewing in college. Originally, it was in the Marathon Motor Works building (where Antique Archaeology is located now) but moved to its new location in “the gulch” recently.
My favourite part of the tour was learning about the bottling and packaging process which was originally done on a machine called a Maheen but was quickly replaced because, as the tour guide told us, it caused a lot of “rage against the maheen”. It was slow and labour intensive and so the plant switched to an Italian bottling machine and is much more efficient as a result. Another cool part of the tour was learning about what Yazoo does with their excess grains. Like Steamwhistle, Yazoo partners with local farms to use the excess grain as feed for livestock. What was cool however is that Nashville is home to a number of restaurants that have “yazoo-fed beef (or whatever meat)”. I think this would be a neat way to localize Ontario’s culinary tourism market as well.
All in all it was a wonderful (and just plain filling) day. Check back tomorrow to read about my time at the National Conference for Public History 2015!
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