236. ASW Distillery of Atlanta Georgia

Welcome to another trip down the bourbon road with your hosts Jim and Mike. So grab a glass of your favorite bourbon and kick back.

Well you know Jim, we're fixing to drink a bourbon that was aged with some heartwood. You know what else I love to have that's made with heartwood. What's that? Some bourbon aged maple syrup from seldom seen farms up in Ohio. He's taken charred bourbon barrels have been used. He's taken a filled them with that maple syrup. Let's some age six to nine months. And then I get to pour them all over pancakes. It's like a fat man's dream, isn't it?

Well, you're eating your pancakes and I'm drinking an old fashioned made with it. Uh, you know, I'll take a half ounce of that maple syrup, two ounces of bourbon, a splash of bitters, put it over some ice and man, is it one heck of an old fashioned. So you eat your pancakes. I'll drink my old fashioned. We'll both be happy. How's that? Yeah. Where can they find this syrup at Jim? You could find it on seldom seen maple.com. You can buy it by the bottle. You can buy it by the case. They have gift sets. Check them out. Hello, everybody. I'm Jim Shannon. I'm Mike Hyatt. And this is the Bourbon Road. And today, Mike, we're kind of in Georgia.

But you know, there's a singer, Alison Krauss, she had a song about Atlanta. And this is where this distillery is from right here, ASW distillery. And we got Justin Manglitz, their master distiller on there. He's with us today. Justin, welcome to the Bourbon Road. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're glad to have you here.

There's a lot going on in Georgia these days, Mike. I'm surprised at how much is going on. It seems like every time we turn around, we're talking to somebody out whiskey in Georgia.

Yeah. The ASW is actually the second legal distillery. I'm sure there were a lot, a lot of distilleries in the Hills that were not legal, but ASW is the second distillery, legal distillery in Georgia. Is that right, Justin?

Uh, we're, we're the largest distillery in Georgia, I believe still second in Atlanta for sure. But maybe not in the whole state. Yeah.

So Justin, tell us about ASW when it was founded.

So American Spirit Works Distillery was founded by Jim and Charlie, my partners, Jim Chastain and Charlie Thompson about 12 years ago. And they were, they originally founded it as a company to sell a spirit whiskey product, a white spirit whiskey product called American Spirit Whiskey. And After a couple years of doing that, they decided they wanted to open a physical distillery, which at that point they needed someone who knew how to make whiskey. And it just so happened that I had gone to school with Jim's little sister, and Jim had actually gone to school with my older sister. And Jim's little sister said, Oh, you should try my, my buddy Justin's whiskey. It's so good. And, you know, most of the time when people tell you that is not so good.

Right.

And that is the, that is the truth sometimes.

Right. Yeah. So luckily Jim listened to her and they had me drive down to Atlanta with, with a bottle and they tasted my whiskey and we started building a distillery.

Wow. It's pretty good when the product convinced them, right? They didn't even have to interview you. They just drank your juice.

Never, never had to write a resume in my life.

So Justin, you guys sent us two bottles today. Uh, you know, bourbon podcast, you gotta have a little whiskey to drink. If you're going to have a bourbon podcast, you sent us a bottle, uh, named the fiddler and you got a great story behind that. And then on the second half, we'll be drinking the resurgence, uh, a rye whiskey. I know Jim is super excited about this one. I'm actually excited about this one too. It's kind of a double-oaked rye Jim, so I know you're really, really excited about it. But the first one we're going to get to is the Fiddler Georgia Heartwood. Tell us about that bourbon and how it came about.

Well, the Fiddler bourbon line is a Originally comes from Jim's brain. He found out I'm an old time fiddler. Old time is the Southern Appalachian fiddling tradition, music tradition that predates bluegrass that Bill Monroe made bluegrass from in the 40s and 50s. And when he found out I was a fiddler, this was probably 2013 or so, he had the idea to do a line of a brand of whiskey called Fiddler, where we would basically find whiskies that we liked, sourced whiskies that we liked, and then I would fiddle with them in different ways and be upfront about what we were doing with them. And there's been a whole iteration of them. Fiddler Unison, which is our kind of flagship mainline bottle, is actually the way I fiddle with that is I blend my pot still bourbon, high malt bourbon with a high wheat MGP source bourbon. This Fiddler Georgia Heartwood was one of the very first ones. I actually had planned it from the beginning, not the name necessarily, but the concept. Me and my dad, before we even built the distillery, me and my dad, we heat with fire, we heat with wood at our homes. So we went and put down some white oak trees and split out the heartwood, split all the sapwood off of it. split it down into slab shapes and stickered it up on pallets to age in the sun and the rain on my farm to leach out the tannins and mature the wood. And then I take that white oak heartwood and saw it down into stave shapes and then char it. And then we put those staves in the barrels. That's how I fiddle with the Georgia Heartwood. And there's been other iterations of it as well. The two main ones now are Unison and Georgia Heartwood. And Georgia Heartwood is a cast strength, generally done as single barrel picks. Uh, and then people love it. And a lot of times we, we double barrel it. Uh, so it's, it's what people love about a bourbon big and bold and sweet. No key.

And we didn't listen to him.

He likes that we did burden. So the one we have day is 115.6 proof. I'm super excited to drink it. Jim, what do you think? I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm itching. Justin, we say cheers to you. Cheers. Nice, beautiful nose on this right here. You know how I say you're walking into a floral shop and they've got all those roses around Valentine's day and you smell that, just that aroma of roses. That's what I'm getting right here.

Yeah, it's sweet and it's got a nice, a nice oaky waft to it. I mean, did you say this is potentially double barreled or it is double barreled?

Those that was almost certainly double-barreled. Most of them are double-barreled and then also have large amounts of heartwoods. Usually I'll put 20 to 30 staves of heartwood in it for Usually eight weeks or so. So it's actually, it's actually triple oak. There you go. Triple oak. Yeah.

Triple oak. I'm definitely getting all that out of there. That almost a nice rich cereal note. You know, I always say honey smack them. Um, one of the, my favorite cereals all the time, that frog on there. Um, I'll say let's, let's drink some cheers. Cheers.

So, like I said, Georgia Heartwood is generally done as single barrel, so each one ranges from very different to a little different from the next. Both because we do As all your listeners are aware, individual barrels can result in pretty unique spirit. And then when you put it in a second barrel, you're adding another X factor, right? That second barrel is also going to generate its own uniqueness in the spirit. And then the heartwood, itself, whether I put 20 or 25 or 30 pieces and how long it sits, that contributes some difference. But then also, you know, the wood itself that I'm putting in it can be a little different. And sometimes we'll, we'll do little special ones. We just, we did one where we took all the most heavy charred ones and we called it the alligator barrel. It was really good.

Well, Mike, I was, I was, I was thinking how soft this was entering the palette up front. So it's kind of, it's kind of funny how, how it just eases over the front of the tongue kind of sneaks up on the middle of the palette and gives you a little bit of sizzle on the back. It's got some spice to it. Some barrel spice, a lot of Oak there, but man, is it soft up front.

Yeah, that's the wheat. I was going to say it's, it's creamy almost, um, like a heavy, heavy cream. Um, and then once it gets to that back though, boy, that barrel spice, it takes a whole, like a, like a wild cat or something, trying to grab ahold of that tongue.

And you say this is three to four years?

Uh, that's, that's over four that if that was from this year, it was more like five. Yeah.

So do you guys have other wieners that you're laying down right now for future, future bottles?

And most of our, I mean, only stuff that I make, I make 30 different whiskies here on my stills in over time. I mean, mostly, uh, I concentrate on the resurgence Rymalt. So it's a hundred percent Rymalt. Uh, we sell a lot of that. Then I make duality double malt, which is 50% rye malt and 50% cherry smoked malt. We sell that in both cast strength, which is usually in the 105 to 110 range, and we sell it in an 88 proof version. That's usually coming out of 30 gallon barrels. So it's pretty wood forward, but it's also got that wood smoke from the cherry smoke. malt that it kind of, it can range a lot in flavor as well, but it bridges the gap hopefully to get some, get bourbon drinkers who like a lot of wood interested in some different malt profiles, different whiskies that, you know, maybe a little bit more take a little bit more adventure, adventurous palette to appreciate cause it's a little different.

So explain your pot stills to us that you have. I mean, I've seen photos of them, um, very beautiful from Vindome here in Louisville, right? Um, but explain how you use those.

Yeah. So, so my distillation method, which I taught myself starting 20 years ago, 22 years ago. And now, is basically a traditional Scottish double distillation generally method on traditional Olympic stills. But when I built this place and designed the equipment for it, I wanted to do something a little different that I was pretty sure would work. So in Scotland, Everything is distilled from wash, so there's no grain in the fermentation and distillation. It's all made from essentially like beer. It's the grain separated pre-fermentation in the lotter ton, and then it's distilled as a wash. Their distillation method in Alembic stills produces very clean and very flavorful spirit. That's what I'm used to making. At the same time, the American innovation, when people came to America and started making whiskey, the grains that grow in America easily, rye and corn, you can't really treat like that because they don't have a husk material that allows them to be separated in the mashing process. they're generally, historically, they started making them in a grain in fermentation and distillation method. So the entire mash, cereals or malts, whatever, all went into the fermenter and fermented and then all of that went into the pot. Well, when you put all of that solid material in a traditional pot still, which, you know, until 120 years ago, that's what people were using, that extracts a lot of flavor from those solid materials. So I wanted to, and that's how bourbon is made up in your area in Kentucky, it's mash going into a continuous column still. And I wanted to combine those two aspects because I thought that's how I would get the most flavorful whiskey possible was to pull as much flavor as possible from the grains going into the mash, specifically malts going into the mash. and then distill it in the way that I always had, which is easy to tailor to pull more flavor while leaving undesirable stuff behind in your cuts. So, my pot stills, Vindome, so if I had had stills made in Scotland by Forstus or somebody, they don't They can't they couldn't accommodate what I wanted to do because the way that they put the way they put heat into their stills is usually with a steam either coil inside or double wall. Cylinder and that causes your grain inside your still if you don't put if you put mash in it instead of wash That causes it to scorch which I know Woodford has has found that out and has tried to deal with that What I did is I wanted to have Vindome build me a still that I could put mash in and but that the top of it was basically a Scottish still. So my stills have a steam pan in the bottom, which means I can heat them at the bottom while I'm running my agitator to keep the mash from sticking, right, from scorching. But then the tops of them, my wash still is a Glenn Farkless, basically patterned after Glenn Farkless, and my spirit still is patterned after Glenn Marangi. So the shapes of the stills I chose to push the whiskey towards what I wanted it to be. And I was pretty sure that all that would work, and it does. As it took a little proving, when I started winning double golds at San Francisco, it was vindication that this kind of new thing that I came up with actually Because in Scotland, they would never do what I would do. Their notion is that if you put solids into your wash still, your mash still, you're going to mess up your whiskey. It's going to carry over tannins, whatever. That's not the case.

Well, you're not trying to be Scotland, you're trying to be Georgia. I'm just trying to be me, Appalachia. Georgia, right? Appalachia. Hey, there ain't nothing wrong with that. I think that's with a beauty about American craft distilleries is that people are being innovative and they're trying new things and giving us something different besides the same old whiskey that people have been drinking for

you know a thousand years well there's a place for everything and yeah you know we're just trying to expand how many you know the the things that are allowed on the table

Yeah, I love the way you've turned the process into a kind of a core competency and you've really focused on that, doing it your way. And I also hear a lot about malt. You mentioned malt a lot. So do you like working with malted grains primarily?

Mostly what I do is with malted grains. So malt has more flavor. essentially than any other grain that you can get. So corn has corn flavor, right? And rye has a lot of flavor. But the thing with malt is that the process of malting it intensifies the flavors and can be the flavors can be tailored through the kilning process through different treatments that the malter does to expand the the paints that I have available to paint with. So just like beers, there's essentially infinity combinations of beer, right? Styles of beers that people are inventing new ones every day. That can be done as well with whiskey if you use those same types of malts. and say we're going to focus on the grains going into our mash. So, for example, a lot of the flavor coming over in a bourbon, some of it's coming over from the secondary grains in the mash. But frankly, a lot of it's coming over from the yeast. They have very exciting yeast strains. I've been using them for a long time. Each house tends to have something that is proprietary or traditional for them. I don't experiment a lot with yeast because yeast are very unpredictable. The flavors that I'm going to get from a yeast, I don't know exactly what that's going to be as it breaks down in the barrel three or four years later, right? I've made 10,000 batches of beer. So I know exactly what every malt essentially is going to do in the whiskey. So I use the malts, different malts to give me different flavors. And if I'm making a bourbon, I'm just using mostly malt rather than cereal rye or whatever, or cereal wheat. For the ones I make, actually, it's high malt. It's 45% malt. But it's got rye malt, it's got wheat malt, it's got several barley malts. Those are all giving me. Complexity and the flavor, which is then married with the complexities of the barrels.

Well, let's, let's take a minute because you know, our listener base, uh, they're not spending their days in a distillery, you know, they're spending their days drinking whiskey. And, and quite honestly, a lot of times when, when a whiskey drinker hears about malt, he thinks about barley. He thinks malt barley, that's the grain barley. So when somebody says it's 5% malt, they think, well, it's got a 5% barley component in it. But malt is actually the process of allowing a grain to sprout partially and then drying it out. Right, exactly.

And so in Scotland, legally, malt can only be barley. In America, luckily, we consider anything that's sprouted and stopped in the germination process to be malt. So we have wheat malt, we have rye malt, we have scads of different types of malts. And within each of those general grain types will be a lot of variation that can be applied. So yeah, sorry about that.

No, that's fine. It's fine. And when that malting occurs, that little sprout starts to come out of the seed and that starts that starch conversion inside the grain.

Right. So the malt, when you start with corn or any cereal, that's a complex starch in that corn, in the cereal grain, whether it's cereal rye or cereal corn. And when I say cereal, that just means unmalted grain. So if I start with corn, I've got to break that starch down, that complex starch down into a simple starch by cooking the corn before I can break the starch down the simple starch down into sugar so that I can have the yeast convert the sugar into alcohol. With a malt, the sprouting process does that first step for me. It converts the complex starch in the barley or whatever into a simple starch. And then in the mashing process, at the same time, it creates in that malt, in that little seed, it creates an enzyme, diastatic enzymes that are able to, at the right temperature, convert that simple starch into sugar, which then can be converted into alcohol. So malt not only skips a step, lets you skip a step, but it also gives you a little more access to different flavors. Uh, you know, and I'm sure people would argue with me on that. That's, that's my take on it. Nobody argues about beer.

So, well, welcome to Malton university. Cause we just educated a bunch of people on We really appreciate you taking the time to give that explanation. Cause sometimes I think we lose people in the process of our conversations and it's nice to back up a little bit and slow down. And you know, they'll, they'll remember that. What do you think, Mike?

I think it's great, uh, breaking that down, um, to where a simple fellow like me can understand it and kind of understand what he's drinking in a glass on the process. Us 1% whiskey drinkers want to know everything there is to know about whiskey in the process of it and what craft distilleries like yourself are doing, um, and how they're coming up with that formula to make it a better whiskey. I love it. I think it's just, just fascinating. And, um, that's what I love about craft distilleries. And I think that's what our listeners love too, Jim, right? I think stories cause they aren't just, buying a book and saying, okay, this is the way I'm going to do it, the way Scotland's doing it or the way Kentucky does it. This is not the way Canada is doing it. I'm going to do it my way in Georgia, the way I want to do it. And you want to buy it? Come buy it. Well, the thing about me and Jim is, is we love that kind of stuff. And I can tell you, you know, here is a, uh, some praise from the Weedy King of Kentucky. This is some mighty fine weeded whiskey right here. I love it. Jim, it's got that long finish that you're looking for, right? A little bit of hug, man. A little bit of hug, too. A little bit of hug, a little bit of Wildcat in there that'll, like I said, grip that tongue. Those Pop Rocks that we're always talking about. I thought after I sipped on it, it's still kind of sitting on my palate. A good Jolly Rancher cinnamon candy is in this glass somewhere. I'm not sure where it's at, but it's there. I'm getting that cinnamon bite to me. So Justin, fine, fine whiskey you guys got here. I can't tell our listeners enough. If you can get your hand on a bottle of this, you better grab it. $60, Jim, what do you think about that? $60 for a bottle like this?

I think it's a bargain. 115 proof Weider with a secondary finish on it and kind of a unique secondary finish on it, right? With this, the Heartwood Staves he's adding. Now, Justin, I just wanted to ask you, whenever you're, obviously as the creator of this, you tasted the whiskey before and after the Heartwood Staves.

Oh yeah.

What kind of difference do you see there?

Well, it does add a lot of oak, it adds some tannin, adds some structure. that it contributes, honestly, they can be pretty varying. You know, the every stave is a little different, the depth that the char gets, the depth of the toast under the char on a particular stave. I try to kind of pull from multiple boxes of staves where, you know, we aren't, they're not too wildly different, but yeah, I mean, there is, they are complete, I would love, I'll send you a bottle of, pre and post if you like and you can compare them.

How about that? That would be, that would be tremendous. Cause this is, this is exceptional whiskey. It's really good. It is a single barrel so we can expect some difference, right?

Yeah. Oh yeah. So yeah, I'll, uh, I'll pull a sample of a barrel that I just added heartwood to. today or maybe I'll do it next week and then I'll wait a couple months and pull a sample and send you both samples. How about that?

That would be awesome. Can't, can't turn that down. Just the one final thought on this, uh, Fiddler or Georgia Heartwood, and it's around the same proof of what I'm about to say. So, Me and Jim's bourbon of the year last year for 2021 was from, I'd say right now, they laid down a lot of weeded bourbon, Maker's Mark, and we picked Maker's Mark FAO2 as our bourbon of the year for us. That's what me and Jim decided. And I would put this right up there with that. That's some high praise.

Wow.

I really like it.

Yeah. I've noticed that I'd like to assure your listeners that I did not, I didn't pay.

I think most of them know us that we're just two dudes that they know me enough that knows I love weeded bourbon and weeded whiskey that, um, and I'd had this before.

Yeah, I think that the accomplishments that are being made with wood finishing is just tremendous. I mean, we've seen it, obviously, in our Bourbon of the Year from FAEO2 from Makers Market. We've seen it from Broken Barrel. Seth over at Broken Barrel, he's doing some really amazing stuff. And after drinking the Fiddler here, I'm like, man, you're really knocking it out of the park. That's some amazing, that's, that's an exceptional pour. It really is good. I appreciate that. It would, it's a good thing you sent another bottle.

I'll tell you what, it's a lot of work.

Jim would have to beat me to death. What was that?

I said I'll tell you it's a lot of work too. I mean I was just outside splitting staves small enough to fit through the bungs. It's a lot of work and some days I go home covered in soot. So it's good to hear that people are appreciating.

Well I'm glad you're sending another bottle because Jim would have to just about beat me to death to get this out of my hands right here. I think we found a winner right here, most definitely. And I'm sure you're super excited to drink some rye whiskey on the second half of Justin.

I'm ready for the break so we can come back and I can drink some rye whiskey. Absolutely. All right, let's stick with us.

Jim, you know what's good to have with cocktails? You're going to tell me. Bourbon barrel aged maple syrup from our good friends up in Ohio at seldom seen farms. I know you like to make those old fashions all the time.

I do. I do. Listen, it's so easy, guys. You just take a half ounce of this maple syrup, bourbon aged maple syrup. You put two ounces of bourbon in there, a couple of shakes of your favorite bitters over ice. You could put a little bit of orange peel in there if you want to, but man, what a fan. Fantastic old-fashioned.

Now you don't have to pour it in an old-fashioned. You can have it on chicken and biscuits. You can have it on pancakes. You can have it on waffles. I mean, you can pour it just about on anything. But Kevin Holly up there, this is his time of the season to start taking that sap out of those trees. I've seen several posts where he's got all of his lines going right now. So he's up there making it. Once he gets it, he cooks it down. makes the maple syrup, and then he puts it in those barrels. He's working with New Riff. He's working with our good friends down there at Leapers Fork. Several other distilleries around the country are starting to reach out to him because his stuff is magic in a bottle. So make sure you grab this. You said they can buy it in a case, right, Jim?

Yeah, you can get them 12 in a case. You can also get them as part of gift sets as well, like candles and things like that. So definitely worth a visit to the website, seldomseenmaple.com. Check out everything they have to offer. They support the Bourbon Road, take care of the sponsors. Yeah. We'll back to our episode. All right, listeners, we are back. We've got Justin Manglitz here from ASW out of Atlanta. And boy, in that first half, Mike, we had an excellent whiskey, that Fiddler, Georgia Heartwood. I haven't had one like that in a while. That was a fantastic whiskey.

Yeah, I feel like my face is a little red right now. I can feel that whiskey working itself. I'm feeling pretty good right now.

I love it. I had two pours. When that whiskey is that good, you drink a little more than you should, right? Yeah. I loved it.

On the second half, we got some other resurgence rye. It's a double copper pot-stealed or de-stealed rye malt whiskey. I know, Jim, you're going to love this sucker.

I kind of like rye malt whiskey a lot. And I've had a few and I've got some favorites, but I haven't tasted this one yet. So I'm kind of excited to try it.

So Justin, you want to take us through what, uh, this, this rye whiskey is all about.

Yeah. So, uh, actually when Jim and Charlie first started talking to me about building a distillery, they, they wanted specifically to make a rye, uh, and, and I'll just level with you. Rye is a pain in the ass to make because it's gummy and it's just hard to mash. But I had used it extensively in beer making from Rye malt. And also, I was a huge fan, still am a huge fan of the Anchor Old Potrero, not their 18th century, what they used to call their 19th century, the one that's a little bit more aged. Huge fan of that already, so I knew what other people were doing. I didn't invent it. And it was a traditional whiskey from, it's one of the original styles from the late 1800s. So obviously people were doing it back in the day. So I said, well, instead of a rye, why don't we make a rye malt whiskey? And it can be a hundred percent rye malt and I won't have to cook it. And I can run the mashes faster and it'll have, it'll be different. It'll have, you know, different flavor. Rye malt does not have the same flavor as cereal rye. it changes it a good bit. It's still rye, it's still noticeably rye, but it is fairly different than if you have a 95.5 rye, where it's mostly cereal rye. It's not going to taste like that. And it has also got about 3% chocolate rye malt, which is a rye malt that I get shipped in from Germany. which I've been using that in whiskey for 15 years, that chocolate rye malt, to acidify the mash and add a little bit of complexity. So it's my own thing. I think leaving the grain in the fermentation and distillation does pull a lot of extra flavor from it. I do a fairly, fairly narrow cut on there on this whiskey. to keep it pretty clean. So it, you know, in three or four years, I shoot for four on this one in 53 gallon barrels. Most of these, that was a 53 gallon barrel. Most of the resurgence is generally three 53s, a batch is generally three 53 gallon barrels and maybe two 30s mingled together. So, I, you know, it's probably the tightest cut I take on anything here. Just because rye can get a little out of control and the head and the tails, but I love it. It's, you know, rye is often a, it's not universally acceptable to, you know, not everybody likes rye. More, I think we have a higher percentage of people who like resurgence rye malt whiskey than would tend to like a high rye whiskey.

Do you think there's a certain reason that that's true? Now, obviously, it's probably quality related, but is there a flavor profile you think that opens up to more people?

Yeah. I mean, so the malting process, when they malt the rye, it softens it. So it's still got some menthol notes and some peppery notes, but it just softens that hard edge that Rye tends to have. People usually describe it as chocolatey, venuous. Of course, that's a single barrel. So it's going to be a little bit different than the tasting notes from our regular 86 proof offering. I pride myself on having as much consistency as is humanly possible for a tiny distillery. I try to make the batches of our whiskey not be very distinguishable from one another. We test that on occasion and we do a pretty good job of that. It's important to me that people get if they buy a non single barrel product that they are getting what they had the last time or something pretty close to it.

So I think that that's important.

Yeah. Yeah. So really I would say the malting process is, is what really changes that softens that rye opens it up with some more complexity. You'll probably taste a lot of honey, beeswax. It's a pretty complex whiskey. It's very fat. My whiskey preference is for lots of body. I like very thick whiskey, which that's what you get running as traditional Scottish Alembic still. It's hard to get that body without that traditional shape of a still and have it be clean.

So this past week, me and Jim actually went through our top four affordable ryes and to write the article for our website, I kind of went into the history of rye. And I was surprised to find that the first rye whiskey made in America was in the 1640s. by German immigrants. And then I researched rye more. I just kind of went down this rabbit hole on rye for some reason. I don't know why, because I was writing an article, but you got to do your research, right? So I found that Germany today is the number one producer of rye in the world. I was shocked to find that. I thought America would be top of the list and they are about 30 down on the list of rye producers.

Yep. Yeah, Rye is honestly that for most of American history, Rye dominated the whiskey market over anything else. It was really just after around prohibition a little before, I guess, that it started kind of losing some ground to everything else and is now gaining it back. So that makes me happy because I love Rye. Yeah. It's on the rise.

Well, on the rise rise, there you go. Me and Jim had this conversation last night.

Oh yeah. Definitely a nice sweet honey on there. You mentioned that you put it in my head, but it's there.

Yeah. I shouldn't have said anything. I'm sorry about that.

No, it's okay. It's not a lot of spice there. Um, yeah, I think it's a little more. I mean, there is a little bit of fruit on it, but it's more stone fruity. I think not a tremendous amount of pepper or a clover.

Yeah. The, the malting process really does kind of dial that back a little bit, make it a little bit more subtle. Uh, you know, it's its own thing. And if you're looking for a really big, spicy, aggressive rye resurgence, rye is not that. It is, it is its own thing as any, any rye malt whiskey that you taste is going to be in that same kind of vein. Well, let's do it, Jim.

Let's try this bad boy. Cheers. Cheers.

I don't even have a bottle of that here to taste along with you. You got, you must've got the last bottle.

Oh, that's good. There is a little anise there though.

I get a little smokiness off this for some reason. Um,

Yeah, this has got a nice texture to it. It washes real well over the palette, but it's got a nice texture.

For being a 100% rye, I thought I would get more sweetness with this, but now that I'm thinking about it, that chocolate you were talking about earlier, maybe that's that smokiness I'm getting out of this is more chocolatey than smokiness.

There's quite a bit of a chocolate note on that. Now on the nose, I got a little more sweetness, kind of that honey sweetness, but on the palate, my goodness, it's chocolate, anise,

I think Justin put all this in our heads cause I, I get a little bit of that beeswax you were talking about. Um, and people were like, you ate beeswax before honeycomb, honeycomb, honeycomb. That's just a country boy thing. You know, they don't get that. They don't get those kinds of things. When we talk about it, when we talk about honeysuckle, when we talk about, when we talk about a whore hound candy from the store, they don't, they don't get it. You and Jim are just a different cut though, or different cut of people.

Yeah. And this is, if, if rice scare you away, if rice kind of keep you at arm's length, you know, I say give a multi dry try. Uh, it's definitely a different animal. Um, this is a little softer. It's got that sort of that honey nose on it. The palette is, uh, it's not aggressive at all. It's a very, very comfortable zipper. I don't know how else to say it. Uh, it doesn't, uh, doesn't jut out too much in one flavor profile or another, just got a nice balanced palette to it. I like it.

Of all the whiskeys I make, Resurgence probably has my favorite nose of all of them.

Now on the bottle itself, what's that bird all about? Can you tell me about it?

Uh, yeah. So resurgence is the motto of Atlanta from rise again, you know, after Sherman burned it. So rising from the ashes is the Phoenix, which is our, or Atlanta's motto or emblem logo is the Phoenix rising from the ashes of, of war. And, uh, so my buddy, David Hale, who's a pretty famous artist now, uh, did that. that artwork for us and that lettering for us right when we got started basically for free. So yeah, because we were just, you know, just getting going and he's actually the great, great, great grandson or something like that of Basil Hayden. So he has a, he had a cool bourbon tie in that he was real proud of and felt like he wanted to do it. Yep. I was supposed to get it tattooed on my arm, but then he had the stomach, had a stomach bug when the dad was supposed to get it. And, uh, cause he, he won't, he, when he does a piece of art, he'll only tattoo it one time. It's, it's your skin forever. But, uh, yeah.

And then he quit tattooing after that, like right after we say he did it for free, but I'm sure he got a bottle or two of whiskey, right?

Yeah. He got a little bit, but not as much as he deserved.

I love your labels, your tall bottle. It's kind of that bottle of a Willet, Jim. Yeah.

We made the decision pretty early on that we wanted to let the liquid stand on its own, not do a crazy bottle, try to have decent labels and really focus more on the contents of the bottle. And frankly, that's really paid off here in this bottle shortage because we have a fairly basic standard bottle we've been able to keep in more or less supply of rather than I know a lot of the folks that have really custom options are hurting to get them made and stocked in time.

And all looking for alternatives right now.

Yeah. Yeah, I love the label that you got artists to actually do it.

Yeah, actually, all of our labels are done in house by Chad, our marketing director. He doesn't do all the art he does. He's done most of it, though. that that one specifically didn't do the art for but he does all the labels that which has allowed me you know like I said I make 20 different whiskies so that really has allowed me to do that to be creative and make a lot of different stuff to put out in the market which you know most of it only stays in Georgia but if we were paying someone to make every one of those labels and a graphic designer, it would not be feasible at all. So yeah, he deserves a lot of credit for, for the things we have out there making them possible.

Well, Justin, where can, uh, where can our listeners find your whiskies right now? Which States are you guys in?

So we're in California. We're in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, I don't know when we'll go one state up from there, but we are available. Our stuff is available on Sealbox and a couple other online platforms. They usually have a pretty good selection of A lot of different stuff. They also generally will have a Georgia heartwood seal box. Usually we'll have a single pick, a single barrel pick of Georgia heartwood.

So still box is almost nationwide. So you could say we're almost nationwide. You could get it. Just got to go online from seal box.

Yeah.

If you, if you got to pay that shipping, but you guys are doing barrel picks in house. You have a barrel selection program.

Yes, it's not like crazy fancy. Like when you go up there to Buffalo trace or something, if you're one of those lucky few where they take you in a special room coated in gold and it's not like that. I mean, you literally come back into. One of our, I have my main barrel storage facility is not at the distillery. We bought a big building on the other side of town where we have a tasting room and that's our Rick house. Most of the barrel picks do run out of the distillery, but we do have some over there as well. So yeah, you're actually going in the plant to pick the barrel. And usually people pick between from three or four and Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty hands on. Well, one of us, one of the partners where we'll usually join or, or, or at least, or a sales guy.

So do you come in there and play the fiddle for them too?

I haven't played the fiddle here, uh, but one time this year, which I don't know if people are happy or sad about that.

I mean, Hey, Buffalo Trace don't have somebody playing a fiddle to them.

I mean, Hey, old time fiddles, not for everyone. Let me say.

I like it. I like it. So can we see anything in the future from you guys that's just a one off of something or something special from you?

Yeah, I don't do a ton of one offs. Uh, most of the, my special stuff is more like limited additions, but then I'll, I'll keep making it so, um, Kind of my after duality resurgence and the various fiddlers, I do my Druid Hill Irish style whiskey. My granny was actually born in County Ovilee, so I'm a huge Irish whiskey fan, huge Irish whiskey fan. And I get, so it's in the old pure pot still style, which now they call single pot still, but I do it in the old time way where it's actually, not so single pot still Irish whiskey it now goes through two pot stills and one column still I actually triple distill it just in pot stills I do 30% unmalted barley because in in Ireland when the English when the English conquered it in the 1600s and they made a whiskey tax They made the whiskey tax was on the malt. So the Irish were like, well, let's figure out how much unmalted barley we can use and have it still be good. And it's about 30%. So I do 30% unmalted barley in that. And then this other 70% is a malt that I get from Awesome, the Locker and Family Malt Company. They've been growing and malting barley since 1906 or something like that. Really cool. And so I have that one that comes out every couple months. The Fiddler Soloist, which is the high malt, double pot distill bourbon. And then we have a whole line of single malts, which range. We have one that's kind of like a Highland style malt called Burns Night, which we are currently in litigation over that. Uh, one of my favorites is, is called Red X. Uh, that'll be coming out. I'll have that coming out in later in this probably summer. That's a hundred percent Red X malt, which is a German weird German biscuity malt. That's also aged on Heartwood. That's the only other whiskey I do that's aged on Heartwood, but that bourbon lovers love that single malt. Um, and just. It really, really hit it. It basically is super fruity, super biscuity, really good whiskey. I do make a heavily pitted malt. So I called tire fire. There you go. Fire fire. It's, it's, I get the malt made for me in Inverness, Scotland. It's 45 PPM malt. So it's like a, it's like an Islay style malt, a peat level. It's not Islay peat, it's Highland peat, but it's, it's pretty, it's pretty smoky. I do that in rum, in a rum cask finish and regular just new. It does go into new barrels. So it's, it's my American take on a heavily peated. It is pretty funny. You know, once in a while someone will see the fire and, and they'll think fireball and they'll buy it and drink it thinking it's a cinnamon whiskey. And they are very disappointed. Uh, cause it is as far from a cinnamon whiskey as possible.

Yeah. I saw you had a, uh, one called Maris Otter. It's a single malt.

Yep. Yep. That one won best craft whiskey at San Francisco, uh, in 2020. No one really noticed cause it happened like the week of the COVID shutdown started. Yeah. But yeah, that's a hundred percent Maris Otter, which, um, if any of your listeners or home brewers will be familiar with that malt, it's, you know, the one of the most desirable malts in the world.

Sure.

Very, very important to traditional Cascade brewing in England. So yeah, I do that one. I also do one called Golden Optic Promise, which is half Golden Promise malt, which is a big single malt. varietal in Scotland and it's half optic, which is a different barley malt. I have a pretty good story behind that. We're probably running low on time, but when an article came out three or four years ago in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the Maris Otter, and in the comments section, because I said in the article, you know, they quoted me saying that Maris Otter was the best malt And in the article, a home brewer got on there and said, well, I really prefer optic. And then somebody else got on there and I really prefer golden, golden promise malt. So I made optic promise with 50% of each just for there.

And yeah, on the website, it says, uh, it's part of your American knock series. Americana. Yeah.

Americana is the Scottish Gaelic for, uh, American. Those are all constant products. They're not always available, but, uh, they're not one-offs. I don't do a lot of one-offs, um, because I have very large stills that single malt bourbon is a one-off because it was a giant pain in the ass. I probably won't make that again.

So, so tell me a little bit about tell our listeners a little bit about your distillery. If they come to visit, what can they expect to see?

Well, I mean, we have actually three locations, so it kind of depends on which one they go to. So if they come to the whiskey distillery at 199 Armour Drive, they're going to come into a tasting room and they can have cocktails or flights or single pours. Take a tour of the plant. You go back and, you know, you'll see the stills. If it's on the weekend, I will not be here. If it's during the week, we do still have tours sometimes during the week. We'll actually be working. If they go to the Battery, which is where the Brave Stadium is, they'll take a tour of our vodka and gin plant. And we also sell all of our whiskeys there. And in addition, we have vodka and gin and cocktails. And then our other location is the Rick House, which is called the ASW Exchange, where I keep 1200 barrels and I don't believe we're currently doing tours in there right now, but it has a very large tasting room. It's actually in a complex with four or five breweries and restaurant and also some restaurants. So it's, we call it malt Disney. a little area where a bunch of breweries open their second locations or a few of their first locations. So that's a whole, if they come to Atlanta and they want to do a whole bunch of stuff at once, that's the place to go because there's a lot to do in a little area if they don't specifically want to see some big copper pastels.

So the Walt Disney for grownups in Atlanta listeners, you gotta go visit, you gotta go get some of this whiskey in your hands. You can come whoop up on me if I'm wrong, but typically the only person I'm usually wrong with is my wife and Jim.

Yeah, well, not so much with me, but definitely we're wrong with our wives. You're right about that. Yeah. Justin, where can our listeners find you guys on social media?

Well, you can find us at aswdistillery.com and also at all the major social media outlets, aswdistillery on Instagram and Facebook and the Twitters.

You're not dancing on TikTok yet, right?

I don't have a tick tock, but maybe I have to tell Chad to make sure that we get you dancing on tick tock. I'd love it. Well, Chad, or let me say that Justin, before we leave, um, you know, we talked about doing a giveaway with you. What do you got for one of our listeners? If they can answer one of your questions.

Well, I'd love to send out a bottle of, uh, how about I send one of the, One of our fifth anniversary bottles of Single Barrel Cast Strength Druid Hill, Irish style. That's one of my favorites. I'll send one of those out with a hat or a shirt, something that won't break.

Awesome. That's pretty amazing of you. So listeners, pay attention right now. Pay attention to the big chief. So you're going to get a bottle of their whiskey. You're going to get some swag with it. Only if you can tell me what type of music Justin plays on this fiddle, you got to know it. And you also got to show that you follow them on Instagram and on Facebook. I'm sure they would appreciate that.

Well, Mike, where can people find us on the internet and on the social medias?

Well, you can find us on Instagram, tech talk, Facebook, Twitter, almost everywhere. Jim, these days main place you can find us as our Facebook group called the bourbon roadies. Some. lovely people in that group drinking whiskey from the bottom of the shelf to the top of the shelf. I wish you could see Jim's whiskey shelves right now. He's got hundreds of bottles back there on the shelf, but we're drinking from all of those. And that's what we want you to do is be able to drink in our group. without being harassed by other whiskey drinkers saying, how can you drink that? We want to see that. We want you to live life to the fullest. So come in our group. You gotta be 21. You gotta love bourbon, right, Jim? That's right. You gotta love bourbon. Who doesn't? And we don't tolerate any rudeness in there, so we ask you to play nice in there. So please come into our group, join it. We do great giveaways like we just talked about with ASW. What a fantastic bottle of whiskey they're going to give away, Jim. I think it's pretty damn amazing. Yeah, I think so too.

So we do two shows a week. We do a short episode every Monday where we kind of highlight a craft distillery, a single expression. We tell you whether or not you ought to add it to your bar. Uh, we also do a longer episode every week. We do a, uh, Uh, one hour episode, usually a two 30 minute haves. It'll get you to work and get you home. Uh, it's, uh, like today with Justin Manglitz from ASW. We had him on the show and, and, uh, we hope that you enjoy that show. We'd like you to listen to both shows every week and Mike, how can they be sure that they won't miss a single episode?

Well, you want to go to the app you're listening to us on right now. You want to scroll up the very top, hit that subscribe sign, that check sign, that plus sign. Um, that'll let you know that we got two shows coming on or our show just came on. You can also scroll on down, hit that five star review, leave us some comments. If you don't, you know what's going to happen. I'm going to grab my big friend, the big bad booty daddy of bourbon. He's going to come over bringing some of this ASW whiskey. Maybe even Justin will travel along with us with his fiddle. We'll drink it all night. Listen to some fiddle music, some of that old time Appalachian music. Listen to that all night. By the end of the night, you're going to give us that five star review, I guarantee. But seriously, those five star reviews, those comments help us get great guests on like ASW and Justin. It opens those doors, gets great whiskey in our hands to tell you about. We'd appreciate it.

So you can reach out to Mike and I were very approachable. You can always head up, uh, hit us up on our website. Uh, we have a contact us page there, fill it out, ask us any question. We'll be happy to get back to you. You can also write us emails. I'm Jim at the bourbon road.com. He's Mike at the bourbon road.com. But like we always say, probably best to hit us up on our DM on Instagram. I'm Jay Shannon 63. I'm one big chief and we'll see you down the bourbon road.

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