Lazy Guy Distillery, metro Atlanta’s first whiskey distillery, plans to open this year in Kennesaw, adding to the hundreds of new small craft alcohol-oriented businesses popping up throughout the country.
“The craft distilling industry across the nation has really taken off,” said Mark Allen, owner of Lazy Guy.
There are already six distilleries in Georgia but Lazy Guy will be the only one that is whiskey-exclusive. There are about 532 local distilleries in the U.S., up from 86 in 2003, said Bill Owens, the president of the American Distilling Institute.
“It is a uniquely American drink, going back to Washington, who was one of the biggest whiskey distillers of his time,” Owens said. “It’s a very hot industry.”
Lazy Guy is being built in the former house of the Calvin Price family, a boot-maker and a one-time postmaster of Kennesaw from the mid-1800s.
The property includes a barn, which will house copper and stainless steel machinery such as filtration tanks, bottling stations, barrels of grains and fermenting tanks. Visitors will tour the production process in the barn and then be led to the old Price house, where they will be able to sample the whiskey in a rustic-looking bar and purchase Lazy Guy T-shirts and shot glasses.
The property is located around the corner from one of the city’s major tourist attractions, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, and down the street from a craft brewery, Burnt Hickory Brewery.
Scott Hedeen, the owner of Burt Hickory, is excited about the potential for business.
“By them opening up the street, that means only more people for us as well,”’ he said.
Craft brewing and distilling “is a destination business,” Hedeen said. “People make vacations to visit breweries.” He hopes both businesses will be included in itineraries for future tourists.
Kennesaw provided Allen, an Atlanta native, an incentive he says he couldn’t refuse: an historic location and $15,000 for property improvements.
In addition to the money from the city, the landlord put in $60,000 toward the remodeling of the historic building, Allen said.
“[Allen’s] theme is based on Southern heritage and we felt the distillery was a good match for our city,” said Bob Fox, staff liaison to the Kennesaw Development Authority board.
Allen worked for an alcohol distributor in the 1990s and founded LevelNet Consulting, a technology consulting company in 2001. He was eager to get back into the alcohol business, as it is “a very casual industry. People get in and stick with it. There is a lot of devotion to it.”
He continues to run the consulting company, in order to fund the roughly $250,000 cost of starting up the booze business, while waiting for his liquor licenses to be approved and for renovations on the property to be completed.
When up and running later this year, Lazy Guy Distillery will produce monthly up to 800 cases of hand-crafted whiskey, made from Georgia-grown grains, Allen said. Up to three jobs will be created for the city as well and customers will not only be able to tour the facility but also sample the whiskey, Allen said.
Under current Georgia law, visitors will only be allowed to taste the whiskey while at the distillery and would have to drive off-site to purchase any bottles of the liquor.
