“It’s a miracle how we keep everything stocked like this,” said Ahmad Salah, owner of Your 4 Way Market in Nashville, Tennessee. We stood in a back corner of his convenience store where two aisles of craft beer met, stacked floor to ceiling. Along the back wall, standing coolers were packed with exposed cans, boxes of beer, and bottles in cardboard carriers. More beer lined the floor in front of the coolers, up to two rows deep, and four rows on top almost touched the ceiling.
There are no gaps; Salah doesn’t like empty spaces. The hodgepodge of colorful packaging created a mosaic, and like a visitor to an art museum, I leaned close to peer at the individual labels and gaze up at the imposing stack above me, studying the installation in its entirety.
With its trippy pink-and-purple paint job, this building, situated in a quiet residential neighborhood in East Nashville, is hard to overlook. Its exterior is just the first clue that this is not your typical convenience store. Snack foods and drinks are supplemented by a wide selection of bagged coffee from area cafés and frozen pizzas and pasta dishes from a local Italian restaurant. But the market’s real draw is the eclectic variety of craft beer from local, national, and international breweries: a weather-damaged, hand-painted sign nailed outside boasts the “Largest Craft Beer Selection in Nashville.”
Salah reopened Your 4 Way Market, a longtime craft beer hub, last year after it was closed following a string of owners. Originally from New York, he moved to Tennessee in 2008 and runs the market as a family business with the help of his father and brother. Upholding the promise in the store’s name, “Your 4 Way Market,” Salah, who doesn’t drink, says his customers “can ask me whatever they want. If we don’t have it, we can get it for them.”
This open offer to his customers is one key to his diverse beer collection. When people move to the city and ask for favorite beers from their hometowns, Salah orders extra and puts them out for sale. If people like the new additions, he keeps them in stock, growing the mosaic of lesser-known beers from around the nation.
This is what Drew Mahan, a regular originally from Michigan, likes about the market: It carries beers he would otherwise only enjoy when visiting his parents, such as M-43, a New England IPA from Old Nation Brewing Company in Williamston, Michigan. “This is literally one of the only places I can find it in all of Tennessee,” Mahan says, noting that he also enjoys the selection of sour and local beer.
Salah’s relationship with his distributors also keeps unique beers in his coolers. He buys from them weekly and values their suggestions. Since he can send unsold beers back, sometimes he buys one pack of each recommendation to see how they sell.
The market’s craft beer offerings are a reflection of the neighborhood itself and its changing tastes. New beers could indicate the arrival of residents from new places; beers disappearing could either signal their departure or a failure to appeal. Salah embraces that role in the community. “If they like anything, tell us about it. If they don’t like anything, tell us about it,” he says. “I hope they’re feeling good with us.”
Words by Maggie Gigandet