ASW Distillery distills grain-in. That means when the mash of corn, wheat, and barley goes into their 500-gallon Vendome copper pot wash still, the solid grain stays in — a thick, oatmeal-like porridge that has to be stirred by a special agitator to keep it from scorching on the bottom of the pot. Most distilleries strain the grain out before fermentation to create a clean liquid. It's tidier, more efficient, and far easier on equipment. ASW chose the harder path because distilling on the grain pulls more character from the raw ingredients — an earthy, textured richness that strained-mash spirits can't replicate. It's the kind of operational decision that sounds minor until you taste the result. The grain-in technique, combined with Scottish-style copper pot stills and mashbills that would make a Kentucky traditionalist nervous, has made ASW the most awarded craft distillery at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition since they first entered in 2018. Their Duality Double Malt became Georgia's first-ever Double Gold Medal whiskey. The Fiddler Encore line won Best in Class for small batch bourbon in 2025. These aren't heritage-brand participation trophies — they're blind-tasted, competitive wins against a national field. This guide breaks down how two UGA buddies and a fiddle-playing, farm-dwelling master distiller built a whiskey operation in Atlanta that's earning national recognition through process, not pedigree.
ASW Distillery operates out of 6,500 square feet of retrofitted industrial space in Atlanta’s Armour Yard district, near SweetWater Brewery. The original tasting room and production facility share this space. Since 2018, the distillery has expanded to three Atlanta locations — including a tasting room at the Battery Atlanta and a Flights & Bites location at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Jim Chasteen and Charlie Thompson, University of Georgia graduates and former lawyers, founded ASW in 2011. Their first product, American Spirit Whiskey, was actually distilled in Charleston, South Carolina to a recipe the founders created — a stopgap while they built out Atlanta production. The Atlanta distillery doors opened in 2016, making ASW the second legally licensed distillery in the city since Prohibition.
Chasteen and Thompson knew they needed someone who understood fermentation science at a level contract law couldn’t teach. They brought in Justin Manglitz, a self-taught distiller who’d spent years running a homebrew supply store in Athens, Georgia. Manglitz became Master Distiller, and his influence reshaped the operation from a startup with a good concept into a genuine production innovator.
The water comes from the Chattahoochee River — exceptionally soft and clean, providing a neutral foundation that lets grain character dominate rather than mineral interference. Atlanta’s climate does the rest: hot, humid summers swinging into mild-but-variable winters create aggressive barrel cycling that accelerates maturation and produces spirits that taste older than their time in wood.
ASW’s grain program is where the distillery most visibly breaks from convention.
Fiddler Bourbon uses a foraged high-wheat recipe with roughly 45% wheat content — more than double what you’d find in famous allocated wheated bourbons. The legal minimum 51% corn provides the bourbon foundation, but that massive wheat charge produces a spirit that’s soft, sweet, and textured in a way that high-rye bourbons can’t match. The Fiddler line is the commercial backbone of the distillery.
Resurgens Rye is made from 100% malted rye. Malting converts starches to sugars before fermentation and fundamentally changes the flavor profile — stripping out the sharp, grassy aggression of raw rye and replacing it with chocolate, graham cracker, and stone fruit. It’s an Appalachian-style rye that tastes nothing like the dill-and-pepper profile most rye drinkers expect.
Duality Double Malt — the distillery’s most unconventional expression — uses 50% malted rye and 50% cherry-smoked malted barley. This combination didn’t emerge from a master plan. They ran out of rye malt during production and substituted cherry-smoked barley. The result was a spirit that defied categorization and won a Double Gold Medal at San Francisco when it was barely a year old.
On yeast, ASW treats fermentation as a flavor-creation stage, not just a step toward alcohol. Manglitz selects yeast strains based on the specific grain bill. For the Maryland-Style Rye expressions, he uses strains that emphasize fruity esters — apple, pear, banana — to achieve the softer, fruitier character that historically defined Maryland rye versus the harsher Pennsylvania style. Different mashbills get different yeast programs, which means ASW’s lineup has broader flavor diversity than distilleries that run a single house strain across all products.
ASW’s still setup is a pair of custom twin copper pot stills from Vendome Copper & Brass Works — a 500-gallon wash still and a 300-gallon spirit still. These are Scottish-style stills with swan necks and lyne arms, designed for double distillation. Choosing pot stills over column stills for bourbon production is uncommon; column stills dominate Kentucky because they’re efficient and produce high volumes of consistent spirit. Pot stills produce less, cost more to operate, and require hands-on attention for every batch. The tradeoff is a heavier, oilier, more flavor-dense distillate.
The grain-in technique amplifies that tradeoff. By leaving the solid mash in the wash still during the first distillation, the spirit extracts additional character from the raw grain — earthy, textured, complex. The agitator prevents scorching, but the process is inherently messier and more labor-intensive than lautering (straining the grain out) would be.
Double distillation in copper pot stills also provides extensive copper contact, which strips sulfur compounds from the spirit. The wash still run produces low wines; the spirit still run refines those into the final new-make spirit, with cuts made by hand based on taste and smell.
The result is a new-make spirit that’s full-bodied and complex before it ever touches wood. ASW’s bourbon comes off the still with a weight and grain intensity that column-distilled spirits rarely achieve. This production foundation is what allows them to release younger spirits that don’t taste underdeveloped — the flavor density is already there from the distillation method.
ASW runs a two-barrel system. Quarter casks (approximately 13 gallons) provide intensive wood contact — the small size maximizes surface-area-to-liquid ratio, extracting oak compounds at an accelerated rate. Standard 53-gallon American Standard Barrels allow for longer, more gradual maturation. The distillery started with quarter casks to get product to market faster and has transitioned increasingly to full-size barrels as inventory has built up.
Char levels vary by expression, ranging from Char 1 through Char 4 across the lineup. The Georgia Heartwood expressions add another layer: staves of white oak, hand-harvested by Justin Manglitz near Bogart, Georgia, are hand-charred and placed inside the barrel during finishing. This isn’t a standard cooperage product — it’s wood the distiller personally selected, cut, and processed. The Heartwood finishing adds intense maple, baking spice, and vanilla notes that define ASW’s most acclaimed releases.
Atlanta’s climate is the barrel program’s secret collaborator. Summer temperatures in the 90s with high humidity push the spirit deep into the wood; cooler winters pull it back loaded with caramelized sugars and tannins. The angel’s share runs higher in the South than in Kentucky — more liquid lost to evaporation per year — but the tradeoff is accelerated maturation. ASW’s spirits often taste a generation older than their actual time in barrel.
The Fiddler Unison Bourbon is a marriage of high-wheat bourbon and high-malt bourbon, both distilled in-house. Fiddler Georgia Heartwood takes the high-wheat component and finishes it on those hand-harvested Georgia oak staves at cask strength. Fiddler Encore is the triple-oaked expression: first barrel, second new barrel, then finished on Georgia Heartwood staves. Each tier adds complexity and intensity.
Justin Manglitz is the center of gravity. He’s self-taught — no formal distilling degree, no family lineage in the industry. He learned fermentation running a homebrew supply store in Athens, Georgia, then applied that obsessive, hands-on knowledge to distillation. He lives on a twelve-acre farm outside Commerce, Georgia, and commutes 150 miles round-trip to Atlanta to make whiskey. His dog is named Feints (the tails of a distillation run). His fiddle playing gave the Fiddler bourbon line its name.
Manglitz’s approach is laboratory-minded but artisan in execution. He’s the person who decided to distill grain-in, who chose cherry-smoked barley when the rye malt ran out, who personally harvests Georgia white oak for the Heartwood finishes. He runs the stills like instruments — adjusting techniques for each mashbill and yeast combination rather than applying a single production template across the lineup.
Jim Chasteen and Charlie Thompson, the co-founders, made the critical early decision to step back from production and let Manglitz drive the creative and technical direction. Their legal and business backgrounds handle the commercial side — expansion to three Atlanta locations, the airport presence, distribution strategy — while Manglitz runs the still room. That division of ego is a large part of why ASW’s spirits taste the way they do.
Fiddler Unison Bourbon — High-wheat bourbon married with high-malt bourbon, both distilled in-house. 92 proof (recently updated from 90). The daily drinker. Caramel, toffee, soft texture from the wheat, with a round, approachable finish. Excellent neat or in an Old Fashioned. This is the starting point for anyone new to ASW.
Fiddler Georgia Heartwood Bourbon — The high-wheat bourbon finished on hand-harvested Georgia white oak staves. Cask strength (typically 110+ proof). Intense maple syrup, baking spice, and deep vanilla from the extra wood contact. Bold and assertive — not a casual sipper. This is the bottle that wins competitions and impresses serious whiskey drinkers.
Fiddler Soloist Bourbon — High-malt bourbon distilled on copper pot stills. Chewy texture, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and chocolate notes, complex grain character. The nerd’s bottle in the Fiddler line — different enough from standard bourbon to be genuinely interesting.
Fiddler Encore Finished Bourbon — Triple-oaked: first barrel, second new barrel, finished on Georgia Heartwood staves. Deep espresso and oak notes. The most complex expression in the Fiddler family. Won Best in Class at the 2025 San Francisco World Spirits Competition in the small batch bourbon (6-10 years) category.
Resurgens Rye — 100% malted rye. Appalachian-style. Chocolate, graham cracker, apricot. Impossibly soft for a rye. If you think you hate rye, try this one — it’ll recalibrate your expectations.
Duality Double Malt — 50% malted rye, 50% cherry-smoked malted barley. The world’s first double malt whiskey (per the distillery’s claim). Sweet BBQ-pit smoke from the cherry wood layered with chocolate from the malted rye. Not a bourbon, not a Scotch — its own category. Double Gold at San Francisco. Polarizing and unforgettable.
ASW also produces Burns Night American Single Malt (peated), Ameireaganach single malt expressions, Winterville Gin, Bustletown Vodka, and seasonal fruit brandies. The lineup is broad and experimental — a reflection of Manglitz’s restless production instinct.
ASW’s bottles range from the $35 Fiddler Unison to $99-plus for the Georgia Heartwood cask-strength releases. At those price points, you want to know the flavor fits your palate before you buy — especially on the higher-end expressions where a mismatch means a hundred-dollar bottle you won’t finish.
OAKR’s blind tasting panel evaluates every spirit without seeing the label, the awards list, or the price tag. The panel scores across 100-plus individual flavor notes, organized into 10 macro categories, producing a profile built entirely on what’s in the glass. When you pull up an ASW expression in OAKR, you see exactly how the high-wheat Fiddler compares to other wheated bourbons, how the Resurgens stacks up against conventional ryes, whether the Duality’s smoke profile matches what you enjoy in other spirits.
The Spirit Match score goes further. Rate a few bottles and OAKR’s AI palate profiling builds a map of your preferences — telling you whether ASW’s pot-distilled, grain-in, Georgia-aged profile aligns with the flavors you reach for, or whether you’d be better served by something from a different production tradition. At $60 to $100 a bottle, that’s the kind of data that pays for itself on the first purchase.
OAKR was built for exactly this decision: a distillery doing something genuinely different, at a price point where getting it wrong costs real money. Explore our spirits data to see how ASW stacks up.
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ASW’s pot-still process creates whiskey that’s unlike anything from Kentucky. Is it right for your palate? OAKR’s blind tasting data and AI flavor matching cut through the guesswork — so you pick the right bottle the first time.
