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.”

In 2024, the United States exported some $1.3 billion worth of American whiskey. A.S.W., which netted around five million last year, was looking forward to seizing a little piece of that growing export market. “A lot of us in the craft-distiller world have just now gotten to the point in the growth cycle where we’d like to start selling outside of the United States,” Chasteen said. “One of the really great things about being from Georgia is our Department of Economic Development is incredibly active globally.” More than a dozen economic emissaries from Georgia represent the state around the world, in countries that include Brazil, China, and South Korea. “We were beginning to engage with them in those countries, but we had to get our trademarks first,” Chasteen went on. He and his partners spent around fifty thousand dollars during the six-month period prior to Trump’s Inauguration to secure the intellectual property of the A.S.W. brands—Fiddler Bourbon, chief among them—that they hoped to take out of the country. Their targets also included India, Japan, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Singapore, among others. “I mean, we were poised to get out of the country, in all these places,” he said. There are a lot of whiskey drinkers in China, in particular, where American whiskey has become a highly desired commodity in recent years. “Hong Kong would be pretty sporty for us,” Chasteen said. But China has countered the Trump Administration’s tariffs of a hundred and forty-five per cent with tariffs of a hundred and twenty-five per cent, as of late April, on American goods. Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. are still expected to roll out, in stages, their own tariffs on U.S. goods; in early April, the E.U. threatened tariffs of fifty per cent on all American whiskey, and some Canadian retailers have reportedly pulled iconic brands such as Jack Daniel’s from their shelves. “So it’s just the uncertainty that that’s created now,” Chasteen said. “These are some pretty stiff tariffs that people are going to retaliate against, and that’s going to keep folks in other countries frozen about bringing in American goods, and that specifically is damaging to craft distillers. There’s more risk for the smaller guys.” Chris Swonger, the president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, echoed this sentiment in a recent interview with the Times. “We’re a very anxious industry right now, because there is no reason for our industry to be implicated,” he said. Other corners of the whiskey market—grain farmers, barrel and glass-bottle makers—are also feeling the squeeze.

Chasteen and his partners are trying to remain optimistic. They have a few reasons to be. The company raised some funding just before Trump’s trade wars began, which they’d planned to mostly deploy overseas. Now this money will act, in part, as a safety net. Chasteen also recalled a silver lining to the tariffs implemented during Trump’s first term. “American single malts did have a little bit of a resurgence because we did, from a price standpoint, start to look a little bit more competitive due to the tariffs on imported Scotch,” he told me. “Maybe we’ll see some of that again.” A.S.W., whose products are now sold in eleven states, is turning its attention to expanding into others, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, in the near term. “Our motto has always been, ‘Many roads to revenue,’ ” Chasteen said. “So if the foreign avenue is looking less attractive, I guess the tariffs are intended to make you look more in the United States—then that’s what we’ll try to do. We just have a lot fewer targets to grow into now.” He sighed. “You carry a lot of burden of stress as a small-business owner—from making payroll to making sure the bills get paid—and, having less options, it is just not good.” I reminded him that more people drank alcohol during the pandemic. “Maybe a trade war will also increase thirst,” he said. “That’d be nice.” ♦