Yazoo Brewing began as just a dream, stoked by years of homebrewing in the basement. Linus and Lila Hall moved to Nashville from Mississippi in 1996, with Linus going to work as a tire engineer for Bridgestone and Lila as a curator for the Parthenon. Trying to make tires more round proved to be less fulfilling than making great beer, so with the encouragement of Lila, Linus quit his job, got a business degree from Vanderbilt and a craft-brewing education through a course at the American Brewer's Guild, and did an internship under Garrett Oliver at Brooklyn Brewery. Linus found a used 10 bbl brewing system from a brewpub in Iowa that had gone out of business, and went to work restoring a corner of the old Marathon Motorworks building for their brewery. Yazoo Brewing opened for business in Oct 2003, and quickly gained an enthusiastic local following.