"Founders Freddy Bensch and Kevin McNerney were roommates at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where they also worked part-time cleaning kegs at a local brewery.
Bensch named the brewery after kayaking down Sweetwater Creek, a tributary of the Chattahoochee River, in Georgia's Sweetwater Creek State Park located a few miles west of the brewery. The brewery also adopted the official motto ""Don't Float the Mainstream"" as a tribute to its namesake.
Two years later, SweetWater hosted the World Beer Cup, an international brewing competition.[4] In 2002 SweetWater won Small Brewery of the Year at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. In 2003 the brewery outgrew its space on Fulton Industrial Boulevard and moved to a 25,000 square-foot facility in Atlanta's Armour Circle Industrial Park on Ottley Drive. In 2004 SweetWater signed with United Distributors, one of the largest volume beverage distributors in the U.S., increasing SweetWater's distribution from 200,000 to 700,000 cases in six years.[3] Kevin McNerney resigned from SweetWater Brewing Company in 2008 to spend more time with his family, and later became brewmaster at 5 Season's Brewing Company.[2] In 2012 SweetWater completed a three-phase expansion project adding additional office and event space, a bottling line and packaging hall, and a tank farm that increased capacity from 100,000 to 500,000 barrels per year.[5]"