Where the distillery’s white whiskey had been contract-distilled offsite (at South Carolina’s Terressentia), the Fiddler line—a reference to the distillery “fiddling” with each recipe in the series—became progressively Georgia-rooted. Fiddler Georgia Heartwood was made with staves of Georgia oak, harvested, cured, and charred by the distiller himself. Fiddler Unison was a marriage of sourced high-wheat bourbon with ASW’s own bourbon, made right there in the distillery. In pace with Atlanta’s drinking culture, ASW was evolving, honing in on spirits that represented its home, and finding its own distinctive voice. “I saw them start to grow and forge this path in Atlanta,” says O’Brien. She remembers touring the distillery, seeing the stills, understanding what they were doing. “I could see them starting to lay down their roots.”

Though ASW is a relatively young distillery, those roots had been in the works for a while. Founded in 2011 by Jim Chasteen and Charlie Thompson, ASW’s maiden voyage—that first white whiskey that O’Brien tasted as a novice bartender—wasn’t made in the state, but the spirit itself was a conceptual nod to North Georgia’s moonshining heritage, says Chad Ralston, the distillery’s director of communications. “White whiskey has that moonshine pedigree,” he says. Beyond the hooch credentials, the whiskey also offered a financial path toward what the co-founders really wanted to do, which was make Georgia whiskey, in the state of Georgia.

That goal solidified in 2015, when Justin Manglitz, a native Georgian, joined ASW as its head distiller. Ralston tells me that Manglitz’s journey in distilling began on his 18th birthday, when he received a bottle of Macallan 18 as a high-school graduation gift. The single malt inspired Manglitz to become self-taught in brewing and distilling. “Justin had wanted to open a distillery pretty much from the day he got that Macallan 18,” Ralston says.

“Producing whiskey here in Georgia was always Jim and Charlie’s goal; they just needed a sensible way to get to it,” says Manglitz. So, they got to work. ASW raised capital, built out a production facility in Atlanta, and ordered two custom-made copper stills from Vendome in Kentucky—pot stills, not the continuous column-style stills most industrial distilleries use. Since then, Manglitz says, nearly everything they’ve made has been distilled in-house, other than the portion of Fiddler Unison that’s sourced.

In just a few short years, the distillery racked up awards, acclaim, and street cred among the city’s best bartenders. In 2018, ASW swept the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits Competition, taking home three silver medals, one gold, and, for its Duality Double Malt whiskey, a unanimous double-gold.

“I can't even disassociate myself and what I do from Georgia, because Georgia is who I am,” says Manglitz, who was born in Haralson County and has never lived outside the state. While almost all of ASW’s products have been distilled in-house for the last few years, sticking close to those roots without compromising the product isn’t always easy. Manglitz recalls one noble experiment, in which he attempted to make bourbon with heirloom, Georgia-grown corn. “It makes the best grits you'll ever eat in your life, but it makes a very corny bourbon,” he says. “That's how bourbon tasted 50 years ago ... when it started falling out of favor.” Georgia has no malting facilities, which makes it hard to work with Georgia wheat. And a lot of the agricultural products grown in Georgia that Manglitz could theoretically use are animal-grade, not necessarily fit for people to eat (or drink).