Billy Ray set out to make some moonshine just as his family had done for some two hundred years. 

He and his wife, Joanna’s families have been in the bootlegging business for as long as anyone can remember. They all gathered every year for Thanksgiving and after a delicious, southern meal, would pull out respective flasks and share a little. Billy Ray hadn’t been making moonshine for many years, but one year he couldn’t help but tell them straight that something was off with the moonshine. ”Tell whoever you getting that from to move their still!” he told them. 

Billy smiled and told me that the water is so important to the product. You need good spring water. 

“Well, where’s yours?” they jabbed. 

So, Billy Ray set out to make some moonshine. He had bought some land that his daddy and uncles had worked on in Leighton, Alabama. ”It used to be all orchards here,” he reminisced. He would come with them when he was a boy. They used to take care of the trees and harvest the fruit. They’d take their lunch up the rock ledge by a spring. And they had a still hidden up there too.

Billy remembers his family bootlegging, and he has some stories! Until fairly recent, Alabama has been a dry state, and some of the counties are still. His family ran moonshine for generations and he learned how to make it when he was ten years old. Moonshine was big business in the south. Friends would often run it up to the northern states because the Yankees would pay three times the amount, then they’d steal a Cadillac to get home, and transfer the engine to a Ford to make it so fast, they’d outrun any law enforcement. 

(Fun fact: Nascar was started with prohibition and the bootlegger’s cars.)

Well now Billy decided he was going to make some moonshine and headed up to his land in Alabama near that spring to do so. He looked for cover under trees and was spending a lot of time up there planning it out. About that time, his beautiful wife, Joanna, got to thinking that he had a woman on the side, or something, and demanded to know what he was up to! He confessed his idea and she threw a fit. ”You’ll end up in jail!” she exclaimed. He argued that Alabama is not going to let him make moonshine legally! 

Joanna took the reins with the paperwork and research and Dawson Distillery is now the first legal moonshine distillery in the state of Alabama! They use a two hundred year old recipe that has been passed down through the generations and it is good. In fact, Doug and I are making it the base of all of our remedies for our new apothecary. 

I wondered how moonshine was made. I’ve heard about it plenty and have read many a book where one of the characters was making moonshine and hiding their stills. The traditional Cherokee and the Scottish and Irish in these parts made their herbal medicines with whiskey, so I was curious. Billy was kind enough to explain it to me.

I understood up to a point, as I’ve made a bit of wine, but then it goes beyond that. It starts with the mash of rye or corn and good spring water, yeast, and sugar. The Dawsons use non-GMO sugar and an heirloom red corn. That bubbles away while the yeast eats the sugar. Now at this point in wine making, we’d bottle it. But they keep going. When the sugar is all gone, it’s time to put it into the copper still. Heating the still, the alcohol boils at a lower temperature than the water and will dissipate, drip down the pipes and into another receptacle. The water stays in the pot. Now you have moonshine. When you put it in oak barrels, the proof starts to go down and in two years you have whiskey. 

Billy’s parents both went to jail for bootlegging, their names were Pride and Grace. Cheekily, on the back of the LaGrange Mountain Spirits bottle, it states, “Brewed with Love, Grace, and Pride.”

If you are visiting northern Alabama, just turn off the highway there at the LaGrange school site, head down the dirt road and turn left under the sign. That road carries you back a ways and there you will find an unassuming, unmarked pole barn with three barking dogs that serve as the welcome committee. Go on in and have yourself a sip of real moonshine, smooth and delicious and listen to it sing you a song about the forests and springs and the history of this place.