Daniel Bell/Daily Citizen-NewsDalton Distillery founder Chuck Butler examines sunflower seeds that will be used to make the new TazaRay Sunflower Spirits.

DALTON, Ga. — As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, but when the Dalton Distillery proprietors created their new sunflower spirit, it was necessity and a good dose of family history that inspired the product.

“My dad (Raymond Butler) is the master distiller. He was born in 1942, and his family has made moonshine for over a hundred years. They always added malted sunflower seeds to their moonshine,” said Chuck Butler, founder of the company. “Family history is a big part of it. The Butler family always has used sunflower, even when moonshine distilling was illegal. Due to the competitive market at that time, the Butlers sprinkled sunflower seeds in their moonshine to give it a unique taste that stood out from the rest. When we founded Dalton Distillery, we started out making traditional and cinnamon whiskey, using corn, sunflower seeds and malted wheat.”

But one member of the distillery family, partner and marketing director Van Brown’s 25-year-old son, has celiac disease, a reaction to eating gluten, and has never been able to try the moonshine made in Dalton, and Brown felt the need to fix that.

“I wanted to make a gluten-free product that he could enjoy, so that meant we could only use sunflower and corn,” Brown explained. “We started playing around with different variations. It turned out that the more sunflower we added, the better and cleaner the taste we developed.”

The final product is called TazaRay Sunflower Spirits, and it is made with 70 percent sunflower seeds and 30 percent corn. Because sunflower seeds are not considered a grain by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the product cannot be labeled as whiskey, said Brown.

The bureau did not have a category for it, which resulted in a considerable amount of paperwork, Brown said.

The process of making the spirit is not unlike making whiskey.

“We use the oilseeds,” Brown said. “This process involves naturally malting the seeds, sprouting them and then drying them. After the seeds are dried down, we grind them and mix with unmalted seeds. This blending of the grains produces a clean, complex taste. Since there is no yeast in our products, they do not have that burn that is associated with traditional alcohol.”

TazaRay comes in two varieties — red, which is aged in a used red wine barrel, and white, which is aged in a charred whiskey barrel — and both are 90 proof.

Dalton Distillery sources all of its ingredients locally, including the sunflower seeds, and only uses natural crops, free from genetically modified organisms. All of its products are handcrafted and bottled in downtown Dalton, and Butler said they plan to focus heavily on their new spirit.

“We are a small company. However, we are growing, and as we expand and go nationwide, we are ramping things up dramatically,” he said. “We are in transition now, as we move from traditional corn and cinnamon whiskey to sunflower spirits. We are going all in with sunflower seeds.”

Because the product is so new, the distillery is still in the early stages of getting TazaRay distributed to local stores. Brown said shoppers should request it if they don’t find it in their favorite store.