What began as a side project for Southbound Brewing brothers Smith and Pratt Mathews — just the two brewing beer and having a limited food menu in Savannah, Georgia — has become a growing and multifaceted business that can help redefine what a neighborhood brewery can be all about. What started as a passion to try something outside of the production brewery model in which Southbound had been doing since the start has turned into a operation that includes not just beer, but a full-service kitchen and a distillery, producing spirits from foraged botanicals and locally inspired ingredients.
Smith Mathews has seen both sides of the craft beer business, and few are as equipped to compare the two as directly as he can. As co-founder of Southbound in 2013 and Hop Atomica in 2020, Mathews has now navigated two very different operational models — one focused on high-volume distribution and the other built around small-batch, on-site retail supported by beer, spirits, and food.
Southbound followed the classic production brewery blueprint, pushing beer into distribution channels with a focus on wholesale volume.
“The name of the game is distribution,” Mathews told Brewer Mag. “Wholesale sales — that’s where your bread and butter is.”
Hop Atomica, on the other hand, operates as a local taproom and kitchen in a former service station on the south side of Savannah, where the emphasis is on the customer experience and creative brewing, with no pressure to pump out flagship beers by the truckload.
“We’re basically the exact opposite of that model,” he said. “Margins are better. The batches are smaller. You can have fun as brewers and you’re not just shift brewing.”
At Southbound, that shift brewing model meant brewing the same beers over and over, often in double or triple batches. While that system created volume, it left little room for creativity.
“At Southbound we’d have fun with our pilot system for the taproom beers,” he said. “This model gives us an opportunity to really diversify our brewing.”
That opportunity is fully embraced at Hop Atomica, where Mathews and his team — including his brother Pratt and Brewer Erin Burns brew an estimated 150 different recipes each year. “Every Friday, we’re tapping like two or three new beers,” he said. “Nine times out of ten, we’ve never brewed that beer before.”
This constant experimentation allows for rapid learning and direct customer feedback, helping the team refine processes and flavor profiles in real-time.
That flexibility, however, comes with its own challenges. While the Hop Atomica team follows its creative impulses, Mathews knows profitability still matters.
“We brew the beer styles we want to brew, but we also brew the styles that have to make money and keep the lights on,” he said. That means ensuring staples like hazy IPAs and session lagers are always available, even when the brewing team wants to lean into more traditional or experimental styles.
The decision to lean more heavily into the Hop Atomica model comes after years of strain on the distribution side of the business. Southbound, like many regional breweries, struggled to regain momentum in a drastically changed market since the pandemic.
“Our numbers were rocking in 2019,” Mathews said. “We were planning for 2020 to just kick total ass. But then COVID happened, and the market has never been the same.”
Craft beer sales volume through wholesalers has declined, according to Mathews, who points to the growth of ready-to-drink cocktails, spirits, and boxed wine as key drivers.
“Craft beer has kind of been on the struggle bus,” he said. “The growth you’re seeing in craft beer is coming from models like [Hop Atomica]. Regional craft breweries are becoming tougher to continue to run and operate.”
The brewery faced more than market changes — it also endured physical setbacks. Southbound’s facility was struck by lightning twice. One of those strikes occurred right before a long holiday weekend after the tanks were filled. Power was lost, fermentation temperatures soared past 100 degrees, and the entire cellar’s worth of beer had to be dumped.
“That hurt us,” Mathews said. “Insurance didn’t pay out for a year and a half. We lost all that inventory and had to brew again, and we lost all of our placements in the market.”
That cascade of setbacks — and the lack of marketing and incentive dollars to push back into distribution — led Mathews and his team to make a difficult, yet calculated decision. Southbound’s production facility was put up for sale more than a year ago, giving the company time to evaluate its options. The company moved production to Coastal Empire Brewing, a fellow local brewery in the Savannah market.
“We’re working on all that transitional stuff right now to keep the Southbound beers and brand going,” he said. “We’re essentially combining resources, combining overhead and make it cheaper on both of us.
Making the decision way before they were forced to make it was good, he noted. Thankfully, owning the building outright offered some financial breathing room.
“It allowed us the opportunity to keep the Southbound brand going and get out of this borderline unscathed,” he said.
As more regional breweries face closures or consolidation, Mathews believes the future of craft beer will depend on nimble, customer-facing models that allow for creativity, flexibility, and better margins.
“It’s just hard to recover those pre-COVID sales levels without serious marketing money,” he said. “You’re competing against new brands with investors and a fresh look. We’ve been around for a decade. It’s just hard to compete against that.”
Mathews didn’t begin his career with visions of co-owning two unique models. Instead, he was an aerospace engineering student at Georgia Tech who found himself drawn to the world of craft beer during a college job at SweetWater Brewing. That shift in focus eventually led to the creation of Southbound — a company that, in many ways, reflected the ambitions and realities of craft beer production at the time.
“We opened straight out of the gate with a 30-barrel, four-vessel system with 60-barrel fermenters,” Mathews said. “That was when Georgia laws weren’t as conducive to breweries as they are today. You had to be a production facility to have any shot at making money.”
At the time, Southbound didn’t even have a taproom — city ordinances didn’t allow it. So they set up shop in a warehouse. Laws about a year later would eventually change, allowing for direct sales and limited on-site service, but Southbound had already been designed for wholesale. That model worked for a while, thanks in part to the small number of breweries operating in the state.
Southbound thrived on chain distribution, convenience store sales, and large on-premise draft programs. But as more breweries entered the market — many of them producing lower-quality beer, Mathews said — consumer trust began to wane, and the industry started to shift. After years of navigating the complexities of Georgia’s three-tier distribution system, he realized how little control breweries like his had over their destiny.
“In our state, we have no control over who buys our beer,” he said. “We can only sell it to our distributor, and if they’re focused on something else or if someone else is paying bonuses to push their beer, they’re not focused on us. It’s kind of a pay-to-play game.”
That reality, coupled with the aftermath of the pandemic and shifting consumer habits, made Mathews rethink his approach. Hop Atomica was born from both lessons learned and a vision for what the future of craft could be.
“The industry has changed significantly,” Mathews said. “The days of regional craft breweries at Southbound’s scale — those days are kind of limited.”
Hop Atomica was built as the inverse of Southbound. With smaller batches, direct-to-consumer sales, and more flexibility, the differentmodel offered better margins and greater creative freedom.
Mathews acknowledged that Southbound’s setup didn’t lend itself to modern demands. Still, he doesn’t regret the journey. Each step led him to what he sees as a more sustainable model moving forward — one with more control, direct customer feedback, and fewer layers between the beer and the people drinking it.
“The beauty about Hop Atomica is we don’t have to deal with any of that distributor stuff,” Mathews said. “That’s not even a factor in our business model.”
Yet, Hop Atomica was never supposed to be more than a side hustle. But for the Mathews’ brothers, that concept quickly evolved into a full-fledged business model that not only anchored itself in Savannah, but is now replicable beyond the city’s limits.
The idea began with beer. Mathews and his brother envisioned a small, creative brewery offering house-made beer alongside simple food.
“We wanted to be a brewery — not really focus on food — but have essentially, like, an in-house/food-truck level food,” Mathews said.
The original kitchen setup reflected that modest ambition: tiny, limited, and designed for ease. They chose pizza, primarily because it required no grease trap and, in theory, was easy to produce.
“Turns out it’s not that easy, but thankfully we had great staff to help get it off the ground,” Mathews said.
The building that became Hop Atomica had sat vacant for nearly a decade.
“It was ankle-deep water, half the roof missing, rain was coming in — it was a mosquito fest,” Mathews recalled. But they saw potential. The brothers overhauled the space themselves, installing a 3-barrel system, building the bar by hand, and launching with a scrappy, D-I-Y spirit. From the start, the goal was to provide variety—beer styles, menu items, and now, spirits.
“Our kitchen has totally expanded far beyond what we ever intended it to be,” Mathews said. “Our menu is five times bigger than it was when we started.”
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That pivot into spirits brought another layer of business complexity.
“We didn’t know anything about distilling. The first time we ever fired up the still was the first time we had ever distilled anything,” Mathews admitted. But they learned fast, built a distilling program, and added spirits through an alternating proprietorship. That allowed Hop Atomica to serve cocktails and sell bottles retail.
“It’s kind of morphed this side hustle into, like, a borderline main hustle,” he said.
That evolution has given rise to a licensed second location in Louisville, Kentucky — run by a college friend who saw the value in the Hop Atomica concept and brought it north. It’s not a franchise; it’s a licensing agreement, which gives the Louisville team full access to recipes, branding, and operational support while avoiding the regulatory burden and high cost of traditional franchising.
“It’s a very symbiotic thing,” Mathews said. “If somebody were to leave here and move to Louisville, they’d have a job there guaranteed and vice versa.”
The Savannah location may be more of a “square peg in a round hole,” but that made it the testing ground for what worked — and didn’t.
“When we were helping them design and lay out their place up there, we took everything we learned here and implemented it there so it flows better,” Mathews said. “They did a lot of things right.”
Mathews said that diversifying into craft spirits has become a key part of the business model and brand identity. The distilling arm came after a year in business, and the brothers saw a need to widen the beverage program to appeal to more consumers.
“Let’s face it — not everybody drinks craft beer,” Mathews said. “You might have a spirits drinker and a beer drinker at the same table.”
Georgia’s three-tier laws made the move feasible. As both breweries and distilleries fall under the manufacturing tier in the state, Hop Atomica pursued an alternating proprietorship model.
While the team had never distilled before, Mathews said their background in brewing gave them a strong foundation.
“We know processes. There’s a lot of crossover. With enough research, you can get pretty close your first time,” he said.
Hop Atomica invested in a still and launched its spirits program gradually, refining production through trial runs. What started with experimentation has since grown into a curated lineup of vodkas, gins, rums, whiskeys, and agave spirits.
Burns, who Mathews said has a background as a pastry chef and has a “super foodie” mindset, took to the distillation process quickly. She’s been instrumental in developing a rotating line of foraged gins using seasonal botanicals found around Savannah. All of these spirits support a robust craft cocktail program that’s now a draw of its own. Mathews noted that the quality of the cocktails — developed by a skilled bar manager and team — is bringing people back specifically for the drinks.
Despite its growth, the distilling program still adheres to the rules of the manufacturing tier, meaning Hop Atomica can’t stock nationally distributed brands like Jim Beam. Everything behind the bar is made or sourced in-house.
“We really enjoy it,” Mathews said. “It gives you that full-service brewpub feel, without being in the retail tier. It’s a good program, and it’s only getting stronger.”
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