At the tender age of 21, Mercedes O’Brien’s first real drink wasn’t a Lemon Drop or a Cosmo or a Jägerbomb. It wasn’t even a poorly mixed, misguided attempt at an Old Fashioned. It was, unfairly, a perfectly made Manhattan.
On her 21st birthday, O’Brien was working behind the bar at H. Harper Station, a vaunted cocktail den in a long, dimly lit train depot on Atlanta’s Memorial Drive. While studying at Georgia State University, she held a string of front-of-house jobs in Atlanta restaurants. But nowhere had she learned about cocktails like she had at H. Harper, where she worked for Jerry Slater, one of the barkeeps who led the early craft cocktail renaissance in Atlanta. When O’Brien turned 21, Slater put her behind the bar. “He saw something I didn't,” she says now.
O’Brien treated Slater’s tutelage like school. “I took home every bar book I could get,” she says. Slater loaned her classic bartending texts, which O’Brien not only read but made flash cards from. “A month in, I was quizzing myself every night,” she recalls.
It was 2011. Three years prior, the city’s early beverage pioneers had only just begun to gently guide Atlantans toward the classics—including Slater, who moved to Atlanta from Louisville to run the award-winning bar program at the newly opened One Flew South on Concourse E of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. By the time O’Brien fortuitously arrived behind the bar, the idea of a proper cocktail had grown less obscure, and Atlantans’ curiosity (and palates) had expanded. O’Brien was learning alongside them, memorizing the menu’s 30 house drinks plus a litany of classics on offer. Guests came to know H. Harper as an institution for classics, and O’Brien had to know what to do when they came in with obscure requests. “If there was ever a lexicon to get yourself wrapped around real fast, it was being at that bar,” says O’Brien.
Those years at H. Harper Station laid the indispensable groundwork for O’Brien’s approach to drink-making. It was an education in structure, and balance, and all of the rules you have to know in order to intentionally, successfully break them. It’s what enabled O’Brien to thrive in her next post, where H. Harper’s stately, spacious bar and exacting focus on the classics were replaced by a metal cart and total creative license.
Three years after first learning how to properly hold a bar spoon at H. Harper, O’Brien was looking for her next move. A former coworker was working at a weird and exciting new project from chef Kevin Gillespie called Gunshow, and encouraged her to come in for an interview. “I thought I was just coming over to be a server,” she says. “But when I showed up for the interview, they were like, ‘Yeah, we want you to make a bar cart. You're making drinks tomorrow.’” It was a baptism by fire. O’Brien pulled from her H. Harper schooling in classics, and her culinary prowess, to come up with the Toasted Old-Fashioned, a drink that catapulted her to Atlanta’s bartending stage and that, she jokes, will probably follow her to her grave.
Where H. Harper was understated and precise, Gunshow was chaotic and unconventional. O’Brien had no bar to speak of; instead, she rolled a cocktail cart around, dim sum-style, and made about half of the menu’s drinks tableside (the other half on a pastry table). The format was challenging: O’Brien had barely any prep space and was limited by what she lacked (like, say, running water). Often, she had to gently guide wide-eyed guests through the process. “Every once in a while, you could see in someone's eyes: ‘I did not know that this is what I was getting myself into. I heard this is one of the best restaurants in Atlanta. There is metal music playing, there are concrete floors. Everything is loud.’ So you had to be that little safety blanket for them.”
“I took home every bar book I could get. A month in, I was quizzing myself every night.”
It was a challenge, but one for which O’Brien was game. At Gunshow, there was little or no distinction between front-of-house and back-of-house, and the restaurant’s chef-driven philosophy ruled everything. O’Brien, who had always imagined she would work as a chef, thinks of it as a kind of fate that she was led into that environment. I ask her: what changed in the way that you approached drinks while you were working at Gunshow? “I mean … everything,” she replies. “It allowed me to be in that space, in the kitchen, reigniting that passion and learning more about culinary preparations they were doing. But at the end of the day, I'm applying it to beverage.”
She tells me all of this as we sit in a booth inside Cold Beer, the sprawling and stylish new bar opened by Kevin Gillespie earlier this summer, where O’Brien now heads up the beverage program. Outside, joggers, dog walkers, and dozens of Bird scooters zip past Cold Beer’s patio along the Beltline’s Eastside Trail, the walking path that has rendered much of Atlanta’s Eastside largely unrecognizable (for better or worse). The Eastside segment of the paved path finally reached completion this year. It serpentines from Piedmont Park down to Memorial Drive, just past the old depot that once housed H. Harper, which closed in 2016. (The site now houses a combination cafe and cocktail lounge.) Cold Beer, where O’Brien has already received critical acclaim, is exactly one mile up the path from the place where she first learned how to make a real drink.
Right around the time O’Brien’s formal education in drink-making began, and not too long after she first tried that pivotal Manhattan, she had another chance encounter: a sip of white whiskey. Her roommate had designed the label for a brand-new Atlanta spirits brand, American Spirit Whiskey, and had some bottles on-hand. He invited O’Brien to be among the first to try it. The whiskey made its way behind the bar at H. Harper, where Slater served it in a cocktail, though O’Brien herself didn’t often reach for it. Several years later, by the time O’Brien was wheeling her cart around Gunshow, the same distillery—American Spirit Works—released another whiskey that caught her attention. And another, and another.
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).
“I consider it kind of my masterpiece, more or less, just because I took something that was not my favorite thing and made it into my favorite thing.”
Despite those challenges, each new release anchors ASW further to the state. As of last month, there is now Soloist: its first straight bourbon, and the first distilled in the city of Atlanta since Prohibition.
Soloist presented a curious challenge to Manglitz: he’s not really a bourbon guy. “What I tried to do with Soloist was make a bourbon that did have nuance and complexity and could have enough distillate quality to stand up to the barrel, but not scare off the people who were used to factory bourbon,” says Manglitz. In short, he was trying to make a bourbon that he’d love, but that other people would love, too. “It was a more difficult task for me to accomplish, and I think I accomplished it,” he says. “I consider it kind of my masterpiece, more or less, just because I took something that was not my favorite thing and made it into my favorite thing.”
Giving Atlanta a bourbon to call its own seems like a big deal. History-making. Marketing gold. But Ralston sees it primarily as a source of hometown pride, the way an Atlantan might feel after spotting Creature Comforts on a movie screen or seeing SweetWater on a tap hundreds of miles from home. “Someone could see that and say, ‘Hey, that's my hometown whiskey,’” says Ralston. “It's kind of cool to be able to give Atlanta something to call its own.”
Manglitz is proud of Soloist for another reason. “I think it's really cool that Soloist is the first bourbon distilled in Atlanta. That stuff excites people. It excites my partners,” he says. “But for me, I'm most interested in my spirits standing on their merit.”
When I ask O’Brien which spirit she’d pour for an out-of-towner who wants to get a feel for Atlanta’s drinking culture, she doesn’t pick a single liquor—she picks a flight. “I’d probably do a side-by-side tasting of the Fiddler line,” she says. ASW’s trajectory, O’Brien points out, shares a symmetry with how Atlanta’s beverage scene has grown up and come into its own in the last decade. “Their Fiddler line shows their story and Atlanta's story almost symbiotically,” she says. “First we're sourcing. Now we're blending. Now we have the resources to age in Georgia barrels. Now, after a couple of years, our first straight bourbon is finally reaching maturation.”
“Someone could see that and say, ‘Hey, that’s my hometown whiskey.’ It’s kind of cool to be able to give Atlanta something to call its own.”
In a way, the distillery’s arc mirrors her own career, too: both have grown and learned and experimented in tandem. O’Brien’s drinks repertoire has expanded from that encyclopedia of classics to the technically unorthodox, experimental creations she became known for at Gunshow, and now even more so at Cold Beer, where she has the resources (like two full-time prep guys) and the physical space to flex further.
Right now at Cold Beer, O’Brien uses ASW whiskeys in two cocktails. One, with ASW’s white whiskey, is inspired by Arabia Mountain, the granite peak just east of the city, and includes spruce tips O’Brien collected there on a hike last spring when the mountain’s famous diamorpha was in bloom. The second, a staple on the menu, shifts with the season: this summer, it included a cola reduction, peach liqueur, Fiddler Unison, and a North Georgia muscadine float. In the fall, O’Brien gives it autumnal flavor with butternut squash, allspice dram, makrut lime, and sherry.
No matter what’s in it, the drink’s name stays the same. On the menu, it’s listed as the Georgia sour—but O’Brien just calls it FILA.
Words by Gray Chapman Graphics by Ryan Troy Ford
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