To many farmers in Appalachia, moonshine is an heirloom.
Though the homemade unaged whiskey has a reputation of being dangerous rotgut, the truth is that farmers, especially those in the American South, had been home distilling corn-based whiskey long before the government made alcohol illegal—and it wasn’t all undrinkable swill. On those farms, moonshine was a shelf-stable commodity that made for good barter. It was a tradition handed down through the generations. The most dedicated distillers took great care with their product, making distillate that, though coarse, was safe to drink.
When Prohibition went into effect, bootlegging became a symbol of the ingenuity of the rural farmer, especially in southern states like Georgia, where the Butler family had been distilling spirits for decades. When alcohol became illegal, the price of whiskey went sky high, and patriarch Alvin James Butler began what would become a great family tradition: he started selling the shine he, his brothers, and his uncle made on their homemade still.
The Butlers kept making illegal whiskey even after Prohibition was repealed, jostling against local authorities while they tried to keep their unlicensed family tradition below the radar. Moonshine became a heritage, and family shiners buddied up to local cops, hid evidence in their sick beds, and paid off lawyers with gallons of hooch to ensure its continuation.
“It was just part of life,” says Raymond “Chuck” Butler Jr., Alvin’s grandson. “You needed to be secretive, but it wasn't shameful. You didn’t need to talk about it, because you didn’t wanna get arrested.”
[Editor’s note: This story is part of Good Beer Hunting’s Compound Interest series, underwritten by SMBX, which highlights different ways small businesses can get the funding they need; all of the businesses profiled in this series have worked with SMBX to achieve part or even all of their funding.]
That’s how it went for almost 80 years until 2015, when Chuck and his father Raymond Sr. opened a fully legal and licensed distillery in Dalton, Georgia. Dalton Distillery specializes in locally sourced, barely aged whiskey. Much has changed since the Prohibition days. Even if the business is legal, distilling and selling alcohol in post-pandemic America is still an intractable profession. But thankfully the Butlers come equipped with a skill and tenacity that was learned back when Grandpa Alvin started shining to save the family farm.
“It was just part of life. You needed to be secretive, but it wasn’t shameful. You didn’t need to talk about it, because you didn’t wanna get arrested.”
“My family wasn’t out there to act like a bunch of redneck hillbillies breaking the law,” Chuck said in a 2017 documentary about the distillery. “There’s a true chemistry to making good moonshine. So, anybody that makes good moonshine, you taste it, you know they’re a smart individual.”
Raymond Butler was born in 1942, and one of his first memories is climbing into copper stills at the age of 7 to clean away the green and blue oxidation stains. Alvin was struggling with polio at the time, and he sent Raymond around to handle the moonshine.
At the time, alcohol production was federally legal, but it was now highly regulated, and home distilling was verboten. The Butler family chose to continue distilling clandestinely, but even though they operated on the wrong side of the law, many of the authorities tolerated the Butlers, even tipping them off when federal raids were incoming. Both Alvin and Raymond were arrested over the years, but they wiggled out of it every time. One time, Raymond got nabbed and ended up going to court. The lawyer got him off with two years probation, and the Butlers paid him two gallons of shine for his services.
“People would ask my dad, ‘Did you ever spend a night in jail?’” Chuck says. “One of his favorite lines to say was, ‘Oh no, it was always like a few nights or weeks.”
Chuck talks proudly, and sometimes tearfully, about the influence his father had on his life. He taught him to be steadfast and hardworking. To sacrifice for others. It was Chuck’s idea to open Dalton Distillery, as a way to preserve the family tradition and honor the man that grew up polishing whiskey stills. Chuck did all the work to get the business licensed and find a space suitable for their operation. He settled in a historic brick building in Dalton, a manufacturing town on the Conasauga River.
When everything was settled, Chuck surprised Raymond with the new enterprise, and the two devoted the rest of their time together to running the distillery. Raymond had been distilling a moonshine he called Block & Tackle, because, as Chuck says, “you drink the stuff, walk a block, and you was ready to tackle anything.” They dialed in the recipe and redubbed it Raymond’s Reserve Straight Corn Whiskey, a 111-proof flagship for the father-son legacy.
Raymond had an undeniable look. The so-called “most interesting man in Dalton” sported a chest-length gray beard, denim overalls, and a wide-brimmed hat. He looked like a dictionary’s rendition of a moonshiner, and his gregarious personality quickly made him the company ambassador. Chuck and Raymond would travel to tastings and trade shows together, often with Chuck’s son, Raymond III (nicknamed Trey), hocking half-gallons of his eponymous Raymond’s Reserve and fruit-flavored Real Georgia Moonshine.
“Whenever we'd go to these events, he was our main display,” Chuck says. “There were a lot of craft distilleries, they'd have huge banners and stuff that they spent a lot of money on. We had my dad, he was the main character. People would just gravitate towards him.”
Raymond was 73 when Dalton Distillery opened, and he still came to the distillery with an innovative mind. Serving as the master distiller, he devised a sunflower-based moonshine made from Georgia-grown flowers. They called it TazaRay, named for the Chiricahua Apache warrior Taza as well as its inventor.
While Raymond’s personality never dulled, his health did. In 2019, he was diagnosed with dementia. In December 2020, he was hospitalized with COVID-19. After a month on a ventilator, he passed, leaving the legacy of the Butler family fully in the hands of Chuck and Trey.
The loss was monumental, and it was only the first in a series of setbacks spurred by the pandemic. Their tasting room traffic, which was highly dependent on vacationers traveling south, disappeared. As shutdowns pushed drinkers to liquor stores, retail shelf space became even more competitive. Without a colorful historian to tell the tale of Raymond's Reserve or TazaRay, Dalton Distillery had a harder time connecting with customers. Thanks to supply chain issues, glass bottles became costly and nearly impossible to get. Back against a wall, Chuck drew inspiration from Raymond and Grandpa Alvin and took a job roughnecking on a North Dakota oil rig.
"I want to show my son we've got skills to pay the bills," Chuck says. "We just do what it takes to get things done."
Chuck returned from his stint in the frigid North just in time for Trey’s 21st birthday. To celebrate his son finally reaching legal drinking age, Chuck gave him a very special gift: a distillery.
The fourth-generation in the Butler distilling tradition, Trey had his first sip of moonshine when he was 4 years old. He’d been working at the distillery with his dad Chuck since he was 14. Trey had seen his father and grandfather give everything they had to starting up the Dalton Distillery, so his interest isn’t just in making good moonshine and vodka. It’s in building a business. Even at a young age, he’s traveled to drinks expos with his father, and he’s since gotten into real estate investing. Chuck could see he’d raised a businessman.
“You name it, I’m in charge of it,” Trey says of his new role. “It’s fun, I enjoy a hustle like that.”
Trey inherited the business at an incredibly challenging time. Moonshine wasn’t selling well in liquor stores, so Dalton started contract distilling for other labels, like Tanto Vodka from the former U.S. Army Ranger and CIA operative Kris “Tanto” Paronto. But that business stalled as COVID-induced costs hikes made bottling more expensive than ever. Minimum orders for suppliers were going up, and so was the cost of freight, meaning a small distillery like Dalton was going to have to pay for bottles, labels, and boxes upfront while they waited for sales to catch up to the investment. They simply didn’t have the capital to sustain.
“I had to get a loan to get all the supplies. With all those supplies, we had to hire more employees, because our orders had grown. I found SMBX, and kicked everything off.”
They had strong distribution partners in Artisan Beverages of Georgia, another family business that believed in Dalton’s ability to translate the drinking tradition of the Peach State to the national market. Chuck wanted to do right by them and keep the price level. He didn’t want to ship liquor in a plastic bottle—he and Trey had sworn to never cheapen Raymond’s legacy by downgrading the packaging. Instead, while his father toiled in North Dakota, Trey had started looking into loan options to cover the cost of supplies, hoping to have a solution by the time he returned. That’s when he was approached by SMBX.
Like his father—and any good moonshiner—Trey was skeptical of traditional financing. Bank loans take a long time to procure, and banks are typically averse to high-capital businesses with small distribution footprints. SMBX seemed like a way to get their supply costs covered quickly while also engaging local customers in the raise. The newly anointed CEO pitched his dad on a campaign. Trey says Chuck was thrilled, and their $100,000 bond offering went live in February.
“We had to order an extremely large amount [of glass bottles] to even be profitable and make something off of it to pay the bills,” Trey says. “I had to get a loan to get all the supplies. With all those supplies, we had to hire more employees, because our orders had grown. I found SMBX, and kicked everything off.”
Dalton completed its funding round in April, raising $86,760, 13% shy of their goal. But it was enough to get a bottling line and fresh stock of bottles, labels, and boxes. They filled those up and started shipping them out, with Artisan happily taking the stock. Artisan vice president of sales Paul Bynum was ecstatic to see the return. He knows that big-market booze brands like Ole Smoky and Sugarlands Shine don’t have the knowhow of the Butler clan, and he’s here to support Dalton as they shift their focus toward selling more bottles on the shelves he stocks.
“Chuck and I are going up against huge companies in our marketplace, and we got to fight that battle together.”
“Chuck and I are going up against huge companies in our marketplace,” Bynum says. “And we got to fight the battle together.”
Dalton’s resurgence hasn’t been on the back of TazaRay or Raymond’s Reserve or even Tanto Vodka. It's Responsibly Vodka, a smart-alecky brand launched in 2019, that’s ringing the registers for Dalton.
Devised by Chuck, who’d ironically enough spent some time in law enforcement, the name seemed almost too good to ignore. Why bust his hump shilling moonshine when he can put out a convivial line of easy-drinking vodka and have every big-name liquor brand name drop him at the end of every TV ad?
“His idea was, ‘I'm always telling people to drink responsibly, but there's nothing out there named Responsibly,’” says Bynum, who helped launch the brand. “So, we said, ‘Let's give it a try, let's see what it'll do.’”
It’s done a lot. According to Trey, Responsibly sells 10 pallets a week, accounting for 95% of Dalton’s total volume. Bynum praises the vodka itself. It’s more than good marketing, it’s the highest selling vodka Artisan has ever stocked. A big chunk of the SMBX money has gone towards rebranding the spirit to make it look more in line with Dalton’s other offerings, even if it feels less like what was pouring out of the still when a young Raymond was climbing in for cleanings.
The moonshine will always be there. The Butlers have learned through the generations that it’s something that you have to keep close to home. Something to share with the locals. So if you’re traveling through historic downtown Dalton, there’s a lineup of tastings on the distillery menu—even if the moonshiner silhouetted on the label is no longer around to pour it for you.
With a hefty cash infusion and an inventory refresh, Trey is ready to save the farm once again. As with moonshine, there are many ways to run a business, but it takes gumption to do it right. Trey’s committed to that ethos, and he’s got three generations behind him pushing him to dream bigger, to make that legacy of hard work and cunning finally pay off.
“It’s gonna take some time, but we’ll get there,” Trey says. “My goal is to be the biggest vodka in the United States. And I’m waiting to be the number one contract bottling distillery in the world as well.”
Words by Jerard FagerbergIllustrations by Colette Holston
