Whiskey meets beer meets badgers

Monday Night Brewing and ASW Distillery have teamed up to produce a limited run Scottish-style single malt

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Exciting news for craft boozehounds: Two local purveyors — Monday Night Brewing and ASW Distillery — have teamed up to produce a limited run of whiskey. Bottles will start hitting shelves by the end of this week.



The new hooch is called Monday Night Scottish-Style Single Malt Whiskey. It’s “Scottish-style” rather than Scotch whiskey simply because it was not distilled in Scotland. What makes it single malt? That it was distilled in a single distillery (ASW) using a pot stilled distillation process made from a mash of malted grain. The flavor is like a marriage of bourbon and Scotch — a good entry point for Scotch newbies.

“Atlanta has such a unique and collaborative community, and it has been fun to take that same sentiment and translate it to working with another alcohol brand,” says Monday Night Brewing’s Jonathan Baker. “On a personal level, we just get along really well with the ASW gang.”

Indeed, Monday Night co-founder Joel Iverson used to live next door to ASW co-founder Charlie Thompson back in the early days, when both were still just brewing out of their homes. The two began sharing their creations and have been friends ever since, thought this is their first official collaboration.

“When you make whiskey, you basically make beer then pull the alcohol out of it,” notes ASW co-founder Jim Chasteen as he leads a tour through the distillery, ambling past dozens of stacked oak barrels and two shining copper pot stills.

The collaborative whiskey combined a mash of the flavorful malt used in Monday Night’s Drafty Kilt Scotch ale plus 60 percent two-row barley, which is thicker and maltier than six-row. After fermenting at the brewery for a week, the mix was driven less than five miles to ASW in a rented truck and distilled in two runs — a wash run and a spirits run — over a couple of days in ASW’s twin copper pot stills. The spirits then matured in charred white oak barrels from last August until bottling this week.

“My design for this whiskey was to strike the right balance between extracting enough smoke phenols from the later portion of the distillation without delving so deeply into the tails as to impede my plan for accelerated maturation in 15-gallon quarter cask cooperage,” says Justin Manglitz, head distiller at ASW. “That’s the beauty of traditional Scottish-style distillation: precise control over the makeup of the spirits that we fill into barrels. That’s what we do here at ASW, and I think you’ll agree that it shows.”

Bottled at 86 proof, the collaboration is multilayered. On the nose are gentle, inviting and sweet aromas: floral, almond, cookie dough, and fruity esters. On the palate are mellow flavors of vanilla, spices like cardamom, and distinct cherry-tobacco. The finish is sweetly smoky. It may be the image of Scotland in my head but even thinking of peat, I tasted the heather on the hill.

The image on the label — a black and white badger wearing a coat and tie — was drawn by local artist Abigail Dewitt (that cool font is called dactilograph) and pays tribute to both the woodland creatures so revered in Scotland as well as Monday Night Brewing’s famous necktie branding. During a tasting from the bottling line, ASW’s head of growth and grassroots Chad Ralston noted that the flavor, too, is “like a badger; it has a pleasant bite and it will burrow in your belly.”

The shared barrels will be used again. ASW hopes to devote some of them to a possible double malt whiskey. They also hope for future collaborations. “We’re taking our cue from Georgia’s incredible craft-brewing community to blaze new trails with craft whiskey,” says Ralston, “and perhaps nothing showcases our approach more than this collaboration.”

For a tour, a tasting, and a bottle to take home ($60) visit ASW at 199 Armour Dr. N.E. 404-590-2279. www.aswdistillery.com