. Inside you’ll see a giant mural from local artist Hannah Dansie depicting the distillery’s namesake: a woman from an old ghost story that takes place in neighboring Haywood County. Rest your bones on a vintage bubblegum pink sofa and toss back a $6 cocktail fueled by earthy amari.
“I started learning about local edible medicinal plants as a young kid from my pappy and my grandmother,” Bower says. His grandparents treated the area’s hollows and hills like a pantry, searching for the 1,100-odd Appalachian plant species historically foraged for their medicinal properties.
Like the Carthusian monks of the French Alps who carefully guard the ancient recipe of 130 herbs and plants that go into Chartreuse, Murphy and Bower are similarly bound by a vow of silence about the foraged finds that fuel their Carolina amari. Some spirits, like the Rustic Nocino, have tidier profiles steered by a star ingredient .