Ole Smoky Distillery and Yee-Haw Brewing Company are opening a joint venue in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on May 20, 2026 — combining a distillery tasting experience with a craft brewery under one roof in one of the Southeast's busiest tourist corridors. The move matters to operators because it demonstrates how established beverage brands are compressing real estate cost and marketing overhead by sharing hospitality infrastructure rather than building separate standalone concepts.
Myrtle Beach draws tens of millions of visitors annually, and the Grand Strand market has become increasingly competitive for experiential beverage concepts. Co-locating a distillery and a brewery into a single entertainment footprint — with live music built into the programming — is a direct play for dwell time and cross-category revenue. Ole Smoky already operates high-volume distillery experiences in Gatlinburg and Nashville; pairing with Yee-Haw, which has its own established taproom brand, gives both operations a shared audience and a split cost basis on a market-entry that neither might have justified independently. Operators considering brand launch strategy in tourist and resort markets should treat this as a live case study in co-tenancy economics.
From an operator-intelligence standpoint, the co-location model is gaining traction across the beverage and hospitality sector as real estate costs in high-footfall leisure destinations continue to climb. When two brands with complementary but non-competing SKUs share a venue, they effectively double the programming calendar, split the staffing overhead on experience design, and create a broader reason-to-visit that neither brand achieves alone. The entertainment layer — live music, events — also extends average ticket times and drives ancillary revenue that a single-category concept struggles to justify. Buyers and distributors watching this opening should note that co-located hospitality venues often accelerate local on-premise velocity for both brands simultaneously, which has downstream implications for how territory managers allocate sampling and promotional budgets.
For beverage brands and hospitality operators evaluating growth into seasonal or tourism-dependent markets, the structural lesson here is about risk distribution. A joint-venture venue model reduces the break-even threshold for either brand and creates a more defensible entertainment proposition against national chains. It also positions both Ole Smoky and Yee-Haw for stronger earned media and influencer reach than a solo opening would generate — a tactic that aligns directly with how growth-focused hospitality brands are approaching new market entry in 2026. Operators in resort markets with underutilized real estate or existing taproom infrastructure should be evaluating partnership structures now, before lease rates in high-traffic corridors move further.
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.
