The New Yorker:

In the face of uncertainty, an award-winning distillery in Atlanta hits pause.

By Charles Bethea

Jim Chasteen and Charlie Thompson were roommates and wannabe whiskey connoisseurs at the University of Georgia in the late nineteen-nineties. A few years later, Chasteen and Thompson, who’d started careers in real estate, began to explore a clear form of rye whiskey that isn’t barrel-aged. It was not widely available at the time. Maybe they could create their own version, they thought. “So we literally Googled how to make it and built a little still at my house in Atlanta,” Chasteen explained to me, laughing. They also bought a book called “The Business of Spirits.” “We read that—well, Charlie read it, and I looked at some pictures,” Chasteen said. It was apparent that, if they wanted to go into distilling, they’d need to find a slightly more experienced distiller. They’d also need to start off by selling a clear spirit, preferably an old standby like vodka or gin. But they didn’t drink vodka or gin, so the friends decided to give their mild white whiskey a shot at center stage. They dubbed it American Spirit Whiskey, or A.S.W., which would, in 2016, become the name of their Atlanta-based craft distillery. Since 2018, A.S.W. has won more awards than any other craft distillery at the San Francisco World Spirit competition, the industry’s biggest annual event.

“I could tell you that we knew that the cocktail movement was going to blow up in Atlanta and that rye whiskey was going to have a big comeback, or that the South was going to be this focus of life style—from Garden & Gun to Southern Living,” Chasteen, a bearded and blue-eyed forty-nine-year-old, told me. “But we just were very fortunate that we started distilling when there was this convergence of trends.” It took five years of lessons learned for Chasteen, Thompson, and their eventual distiller—Justin Manglitz, a friend of Chasteen’s sister from high school—to seriously consider making whiskey full time. “We finally thought, Well, we either need to go big or go home,” Chasteen said. “But we didn’t really want to raise money until one of us could do it from nine to five. And that happened to be me in 2015.” They raised nearly two million dollars in seed money—all of it from friends—and opened their first distillery the following year. The company, which grew by twenty-four per cent last year, has opened two more locations since then, and plans to open a third, at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, next month. “The timing was perfect,” Chasteen said. “We were heading out of Georgia, going to other places, and what better billboard than being in the busiest airport in the world?” Then came Donald Trump’s tariffs. “Shitty,” Chasteen told me, when I asked how he felt when they began to take effect, in February and March. “Everything is on hold. The outlook since then is almost changing week by week.”

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