20 Years of the Beverage World in Georgia

Restaurant Informer is celebrating 20 years of publication, and as the magazine’s resident beverage columnist, it seems fitting that I should try to encapsulate the last 20 years of Georgia’s beverage scene. 

The task seemed daunting at first, until I started reaching out to old industry friends and putting a timeline together. I soon realized that we were around at the start of it all! In many ways, we were the founding fathers of this beverage scene, the OGs, the ground zero. Before us, there really wasn’t much of a “scene” as we know it today. I’m not bragging here, it’s true. We, in fact, were the ones who created it, the ones who built this beverage community, and it is my honor and my privilege to tell that story.

Begin at the Beginning

Where did it all begin? While it’s impossible to truly answer that question, forcing yourself to pinpoint defining moments that got you to where you are can allow the past to take shape in a way that maybe it didn’t while you were living it. I spent hours on the phone as I sat down to write this column, calling those that were with me as I built my career, and each person I talked to helped me pinpoint those defining moments. 

My first call was to Mike Gallagher, owner of The Brick Store Pub and Leon’s Full Service in Decatur. He is an owner/operator I have known since my early days in the industry. He was around even before Restaurant Informerlaunched, having opened his pub with partners Dave Blanchard and Tom Moore in 1997. 

The trio’s beer venture blew wide open exactly 20 years ago, when Georgia’s legislature passed House Bill 645, which allowed for the sale of beers over 6% ABV in the state for the first time. The Brick Store’s owners celebrated by opening their Belgian Room within the Pub, where they could finally cellar the high-gravity imported beers they had fallen in love with while visiting Belgium.  

The Pub had opened at a time when “farm-to-table” was still a new concept in our industry, which seems crazy to think about now, and craft products were hard to come by. 

“When we opened, the things that set us apart were just us being the anti-sports pub,” he told me. “No light beer, no neon signs, no TVs, no major conglomerate domestic breweries. We didn’t have this grand plan, we just were really excited to open a place, to serve better than bar food, to have a place that was community driven.

“We realized around the time of our 20th anniversary that we were a small-town, Southern pub that was ahead of the curve in craft beer, and it served us so well we kept doing it,” he added. “Sure, we want to give the customers what they want, but we really want to give them what they want – but they don’t even know it yet!” he laughed.

Things Start to Get Crafty

When the Pub opened, the American craft beer scene was in its second wave. It had already crashed once, he told me, with just a few breweries, like Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada, surviving. “When we opened the pub, it was all about imports.”

A few local breweries were popping up, he told me, like Dogwood, Atlanta Brewing Company and Blind Man out of Athens, but it was mostly all Bass, Guinness and Harp that were available to satisfy beer lovers who didn’t want a Budweiser. 

“Sweetwater, Terrapin, all these guys opened in the late ’90s. Then it really started bubbling up with more and different experimental brewers. Then we really started having a lot of fun, not just buying from people who were making great beer and doing great work, but also buying beer from our great friends!” he told me. “That’s when beer dinners and beer and cheese pairing became a thing. We could do a beer list with just Georgia beers, and it would be a great list. When we opened, there were five.”

Then, according to Mike, around 2011, a shift happened in the beer world. “We went to Belgium, and all they wanted to talk to us about was American craft beer. It was crazy.”

Meanwhile, on the wine side, the tides were shifting as well. Tiffany Morris, currently a fine wine specialist at Empire Distributors, started working in sales for United Distributors in 2005. She used to call on me as a young buyer. When we both started out in the industry, Georgia wine lists were all about California wineries with well-known names – the steakhouse placements, if you will. 

But along the way, things started to get craftier as well, and buyers got more discerning. It became harder for some American wineries, even those that had placed at the infamous Judgement of Paris competition, to be taken seriously by buyers in Georgia restaurants, as they began to demand small producers and more upstart labels. 

Tiffany talked about how it became challenging to represent wineries like Stags Leap Wine Cellars and Hansel. “Even though these aren’t the cool kids on the block, they are the classics. They paved the path for these new wineries that everyone was so excited about. They will never go out of style. They are important not only for the history, but also the innovations they came up with that the new wineries are using.” 

New distributors started arriving on the scene during these years, including Prime Wine and Spirits. Kevin O’Sullivan, who previously sold wine for Empire, left them to work with Prime as a sales rep in 2011. 

“Kevin O’Sullivan was instrumental in keeping everyone on their toes,” Tiffany told me. “He worked so hard, I had to pull out all the stops to keep up with him. Prime was the pivotal distributor back then that had all the cool brands, the small producers. They started the movement for all these smaller distributors who have since come into Georgia representing the small wineries, like Rive Gauche for example.” 

Buzz about Bartenders

Small production started to be the name of the game all the way around. “It was the same with American craft distillers as it had been with the breweries,” Mike told me. “Take for example rye whiskey – we used to have a bottle of Old Potrero on the back bar, and no one gave a crap!,” he laughed.

Around 2007, however, one of Mike’s bartenders at The Brick Store, Miles Macquarrie, had started getting interested in spirits and experimenting with cocktails. I used to see Miles skateboarding all over Decatur in those early days, stopping to see his friends Jesse Smith and Bryan Rackley where they worked as baristas at Java Monkey. 

The Brick Store Pub never had an official cocktail menu, but Miles recalls starting to push cocktails on people at the bar there. 

It probably wasn’t hard, because the entire city was starting to hum with an excitement surrounding cocktails. I was one of them. I had moved on from my job at Watershed in 2006 to work for Chef Shaun Doty at his eponymous restaurant Shaun’s in Inman Park. I had never been a cocktail bartender before, but I felt the coming wave almost subconsciously. 

The craft cocktail movement had been building in other cities like New York, where Sasha Petraske opened Milk and Honey in 2000, or in Seattle, where the Zig Zag Club was established in 2002. I diligently worked on an opening menu for Shaun’s, with the help of our general manager Liz Kim and Chef Doty himself, that combined classic-style cocktails with European spirit styles long forgotten in America and with local, seasonal ingredients. It just felt right. 

I had started hearing buzz about bartenders across town who were doing amazing things, and I wanted to know more about what they were doing. You see, a group of talented newcomers had arrived in Atlanta and started to change the game.

Upping the Ante

Celebrity chef Emeril Legasse had brought his restaurant concept to Atlanta in 2003, and along with him came an opening team from his Las Vegas location that fell in love with our city. Though Emeril’s imploded a short time after it opened, members of his team decided to stay, setting their sights on wanting to open their own place here one day. 

Greg Best, Andy Minchow and Regan Smith all took jobs at independent restaurants to hone their skills, see what they were best at, and made plans to come back together when the time was right, according to a conversation I had with Greg Best. 

Andy went to work at Repast with Chef Joe Truex, Regan went to tend bar at Tom Catherall’s Posh, and Greg helped open Restaurant Eugene with Chef Linton Hopkins. 

“Restaurant Eugene’s bar had just 6 seats,” Greg told me. “I realized, ok, this is the time. I could take the gloves off and do whatever I wanted to do!”

Greg quickly established a name for himself in our city, earning accolades at Eugene. We all started to take note, as did the media, in our city and elsewhere. Around the same time, a bartender named Eric Simpkins moved back to Atlanta from a tenure in New York to open Trois, the third restaurant in the Concentrics group’s numeric series, this one with a plan for a serious cocktail program. 

“There were bartenders at seemingly regular bars who were already on that path,” Greg told me. “They were doing things certainly not required of them at their establishments. That group very quickly started fostering things in their own environments.”

We all met each other along the way, had drinks in each other’s bars, took inspiration from each other, brought it back to our own bars, and continued to up the ante. Then, in 2008, Andy, Regan and Greg regrouped, with the support of Linton Hopkins, to open Holman & Finch Public House in Buckhead. 

“Holman & Finch changed everything,” Tiffany told me. “I’m not kidding. People were eating things there that we weren’t used to eating, like lamb brains. They started the whole burger craze there, and now it’s everywhere. They changed everything with their cocktails. It was so small, but they changed everything.”

Greg told me, “I remember everyone coming in to see Holman & Finch, excited that we were finally open. The stars were starting to sparkle after the Big Bang!”

Holman & Finch definitely was the Big Bang for our city, and there was no putting the genie back into the bottle after that moment. Greg and I went down a rabbit hole trying to think of all the people who had been quietly working toward the explosive cocktail moment that we saw tumble forward from 2008. 

Lindy Colburn (now a VP at St. George Spirits) and Adam Fox (now a VP at UVA Imports) with Ricardo Ullio at Beleza in Midtown. Tiffanie Barriere at One Flew South at the airport. Paul Calvert and Navarro Carr at The Sound Table on Edgewood, the gang at Top Flr on Myrtle. Eric Simpkins left Trois to open Drinkshop in Atlanta with Sasha Petraske. I left Shaun’s to work for Ford Fry at JCT. Kitchen & Bar, which led to my own mini Big Bang opening No. 246, The Optimist, St. Cecilia and more. 

In early 2009, Mike and his partners opened a new concept called Leon’s Full Service, right around the corner from The Brick Store Pub. Miles Macquarrie was put in charge of creating the program, and, he recalls, “I was about to be in way over my head in charge of the program when I had never even worked as a cocktail bartender!” His solution was to stage with bartenders around town, including myself, and get as much perspective and experience as possible. 

“Greg deserves a ton of credit for helping us learn to make cocktails the way we do now,” Mike told me. “We did a trade where they sent a couple of folks from Holman & Finch to The Brick Store so we could teach them about beer, and we sent a few people to Holman to learn about cocktails. Those guys really mentored Miles, and it was really the ignition for Leon’s.”

I agreed with him. I told him that my recollection of the Holman & Finch team was the way they were always so generous with their talent and their knowledge. Many of us, plugging away at our programs, felt like all thumbs next to their virtuoso abilities, but they never made us feel that way. They hosted guest bartenders at their bar, included us in cocktail dinners they organized. Greg, Andy and their team took us all under their wings and along for the ride they were on. It always felt like the entire industry was in a boat being lifted by the wave they had created, but they had absolutely no ego about it. 

Lasting Impact

Greg, Andy and Regan all eventually left Holman & Finch to go their own ways. Andy opened Ration & Dram (now called Dead End) in 2014. In 2015, Greg and Regan opened Ticonderoga Club, along with Paul Calvert and other partners, in the Krog Street Market. Miles Macquarrie opened Kimball House in Decatur in 2013 along with partners Brian Rackley, Jesse Smith and Matt Christinson, which went on to receive multiple James Beard Award nominations.

“I’ve seen so many trends come and go, and certainly have partaken in a few of them myself,” Miles told me. “At Kimball House, we still will use new techniques and will dabble in some new trends, but we try to present everything in an elegant and pretty classic manner. I think we fit into the cocktail landscape in a few ways, but something that makes me very proud is that often, we can sort of function as a training hub for bartenders who go on to run their own programs. To see people work at Kimball House for a few years and then go on to add to the landscape and make Atlanta a better city for cocktails makes me very happy!”

Mike concurs. “So many former employees of ours have gone on to do killer stuff. Bo Brown opened a distillery, Murrel’s Row Spirits. The Kimball House guys were a huge success story. One of my favorite things is when we have former employees not in the business anymore that drop us a note telling us that a lot of the success they have in their current industry stems from the hospitality they learned working with us.” 

I mused a bit with each of them about how we never know in the moment the ripples we may be creating in the industry or in the world. Greg shared with me that Ticonderoga Club suffered a devastating accident in late 2022, when a hot water heater flooded the restaurant overnight, causing catastrophic damage and forcing them to close for almost a year. 

“We had just started getting back to terra firma after COVID, feeling back to normal, then it happened. The partners all had an opportunity, unexpectedly, to decide if we all still want to be doing this. A lot of good has come of it since. It was no joy, it was a great challenge, but what has come out of it I dare say was worth it. I am now a savvier, more capable operator. We made a lot of changes to how we run the place with the input of our staffers who waited in the wings for us to reopen. The team itself was like, we’re not quitting,” Greg told me.

“There were days when I was like, what am I doing? But the response of our community, the regulars who reached out [with] money to help us and our team. It was a remarkable feeling,” he continued, explaining, “You do what you do with your head down, you tell the story about what you do and why you’re doing it, but there is no rubric to chart whether it’s doing what you intend. But when the community at large responds like that, it lets you know that when you take care of people for decades, it makes a difference.”

Connection and Community

What do the present and the future hold for the beverage industry in our fair city? Tiffany feels very positive about the wine community. She points to people like Marvella Castaneda, former wine director at Lazy Betty who is now at the Signia by Hilton Atlanta; Jordan Smelt, who came through Cakes & Ale to open Lucien Books and Wine in 2021; Eric Palmer, named Best Young Sommelier in 2023 and now a wine specialist at RNDC; and Elizabeth Dames, formerly at Capitol City Club, who now operates a private club called The Perlant. 

“All of these people are so humble and so welcoming. They want wine to be good for everybody,” she says. “The biggest thing is the connection of the community of beverage professionals, the tasting groups, people wanting to continue their education. Everyone is so intertwined. The biggest thing I’ve seen is the way the community has come together over the past 20 years. I’ve never seen such a connection between retailers and on-premise working together.”  

Mike also points to the work of organizations like Giving Kitchen as a major inspiration to him about what our industry can do. 

I can’t help but agree with all of my friends. Those who want to be superstars only last for so long, but those who are constantly building for the community and future are the ones who are still around. Here’s to the next 20 years!