If anybody’s earned the stripes to take on the challenge of creating The Bitter Southerner No. 1, it’s Jerry Slater, the owner and barkeep of one of Atlanta’s best whiskey haunts, H. Harper Station. Slater served two stints over seven years behind the legendary bar at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, Ky. It is arguably the grandest Southern temple of tippling.

The Seelbach dates to 1905. Like many old hotel bars, it’s a place of dark paneling and woolen carpets so plush they’ll absorb the shock of the poor soul who stays too long and falls off the stool. But the Seelbach also has the good fortune of being in the heart of Kentucky’s bourbon country. It’s a place where mere mortals can taste things like the impossible-to-find Van Winkle Family Reserve rye (remember the Resurgens?). For whiskey geeks, a trip to the Old Seelbach Bar is like a wine nut getting to visit Château Latour for barrel samples, or a beer geek trekking to Westvleteren for Trappist ales.

“I got really immersed in the bourbon culture,” Slater says of his time at the Seelbach. “It gave me an appreciation of whiskey.”

But even for someone with Slater’s depth of knowledge, the challenge of creating a cocktail can be daunting. It’s a very different thing from improvising a new meal in a kitchen. Think about it this way: Assume that you go to your local farmer’s market and pick up some good, ripe Arkansas Traveler tomatoes. And maybe you’re able to score a quarter-pound of Cyprus cheese from Sweet Grass Dairy down in Thomasville, Ga., a beautiful semisoft creation infused with olives, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic and basil.

You take those two things home and think, “Hmm. Let’s slice these tomatoes and that cheese. Drizzle some vinegar and oil on the slices. Little salt and pepper.”

Once you get that plate arranged, you take it out to your friends on the front porch, and they dig in. They love it. They’re happy. They might ask you where the tomatoes and the cheese came from. But they will not ask you this:

“What do you call it?”

Because, after all, what would you answer? “Tomatoes and cheese”? You could, of course, come up with the full-on, restaurant-menu description, and say something like, “It’s called Local Arkansas Traveler Tomatoes With Sweet Grass Cyprus Cheese, Balsamic and Olive Oil.”

Yeah, you could do that. But your friends on the front porch would laugh at you.