The sensation starts with a slight burn at the back of your tongue. An innocent tingle that quickly builds into a slow- burning, skin-removing inferno in the back of your throat.

By the time it hits your stomach, you're wondering if your esophagus remains intact.

Hyosub Shin/Staff (ENLARGE)

It's lawful to market moonshine if the distiller pays taxes on it. But making it taste good? That's a challenge for the smoothest bartender.

Hyosub Shin/Staff (ENLARGE)

Fire, what fire? Eric Simpkins of Trois crafts his Perfect Shine Manhattan.

Hyosub Shin/Staff (ENLARGE)

Lara Creasy, bartender at Shaun's restaurant, mixes her Blood Brother moonshine cocktail in front of customers Kevin O'Sullivan (left) and Holly Beach.

RELATED STORIES: • Moonshine moves out of Mason jar, into martini glass • NASCAR great Junior Johnson: Daddy'd be proud • Recipes: Mixed drinks made with moonshine • More Food & Drink stories

The liquid: moonshine, 180 proof.

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The flammable stuff is in a reflective Mason jar sitting on mixologist Lara Creasy's bar at Shaun's restaurant in Inman Park.

It's cold outside, but inside the closed eatery the warmth of this white lightning provides little comfort. Creasy has been given the task of creating some mixed drinks from, yes — moonshine.

Which is a little like asking a bartender to make gasoline taste good.

"This doesn't suit my palate, to be honest," concedes Creasy. For weeks, between bartending shifts, she's been experimenting with corn liquor to create cocktails. She's utilized both the legal stuff like Georgia Moon and the real stuff she obtained "from a friend of a friend."

Over the past few years, legal brands of moonshine have quietly crept onto liquor store shelves across the South.

Piedmont Distillers founder Joe Michalek started making his Madison, N.C., company's Catdaddy brand of flavored moonshine in 2005. Last year, he followed that up with the debut of NASCAR legend Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon, based on the former 'shine runner's "family recipe."

"Making moonshine legal was really as simple as just paying the taxes on it," Michalek said. "We also triple-distill ours to make it smooth, and we also took the proof down to improve its taste and to make it easy to work with."

Midnight Moon is even being marketed "as smooth as vodka."

Given moonshine's new air of respectability, we asked some talented local mixologists to work with a variety of corn liquors to see if crafting cocktails from the high octane booze was really as simple as working with the highly malleable fermented potato juice. Why not see what kind of craziness we can concoct with corn likker?

Legality of the once bootlegged alcohol was news to Trois mixologist Eric Simpkins, who's been mixing drinks for 12 years.

"I didn't know you could buy the stuff," Simpkins said. "But, of course, I knew how to get it." He used both the store-bought Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon and Georgia Moon along with real 'shine to create a few corn liquor cocktails for this story.

Everyone knows how to get it, it seems. It's the old tale of the rural South: Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody else who has a Mason jar of it stashed in the back of a liquor cabinet, refrigerator or basement paint shelf.

And it's not just used for cleaning brushes. Folks really do drink this stuff, and 'shine is just as popular today as it was 50 years ago, when it was being "run" all over the South. According to Matthew B. Rowley in his book "Moonshine!" (Lark Books, $14.95), "independent distilling is alive and well and enjoying a spirited renaissance in modern America."

Distilling illegal liquor to avoid taxes is a big part of American history, but it takes particular hold in the South, where rural, rambling backroads made moonshine's distribution a challenge. Runners became very good drivers. By 1949, car mechanic and racer Bill France had co-founded the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. NASCAR's earliest drivers were moonshine runners.

Rowley points out that in addition to the modern day commercial moonshiners who might also deal in other contraband just for profit, there is another "new breed" of distillers who have "grafted" onto the traditional whiskey-making culture. They borrow from beer-making, develop their own recipes, design and construct their own stills and take artisanal pride in their efforts.

Back at Shaun's, Creasy's experiments have had an almost immediate effect. A half-ounce of moonshine, even cut with Creasy's Southern lemonade, made with Tupelo honey, can rush straight to your bloodstream.

"Our bodies adapt to what we normally drink," Creasy explains. "If your body is unfamiliar with something, it can go straight to your head." Plus, this stuff is 100-plus proof.

While products like Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon Carolina moonshine — one of the legal products with a much lower proof — is touted as triple distilled in tin copper to make it as smooth as possible, Simpkins isn't totally sold.

"This is a really rough-around-the-edges vodka," he says, making a moonshine martini with Johnson's moonshine, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, Angostura bitters and a pretty lemon twist.

But the deceptively lethal drink tastes like a very good vodka martini.

"I like to make Bloody Marys with it," says Johnson, who spent a brief spell behind bars after he got caught at the family still, decades before his legal version would end up in stores. "The girls also like to make cosmopolitans with it, and the kids like to mix it with Red Bull."

This trend toward flavorless alcohol is nothing new in the bar business.

"Anytime you triple distill anything, you essentially strip it of its flavor," explains Simpkins. "Vodka is huge right now because people don't want to taste the alcohol in their cocktails. For me, it's like 'why bother?' I want a drink that tastes like something."

That wasn't the approach at South City Kitchen in Midtown, where bartender Chris Dean and beverage manager Vajra Stratigos have taken a college mentality toward creating corn liquor cocktails.

Made with ingredients that include Sunny D, Rock Star orange energy drink and Mountain Dew, the pair have come up with punchlike libations perfectly suited for frat house red plastic cups.

"The idea was to create some party drinks," says Dean, "where you could get all of the ingredients at a convenience store. I had no idea moonshine was legal in this state. We treated it the same as the grain alcohol we all used in college. It's so high octane you need to go sweeter in order to mask the harshness."

While Dean's drinks are less complex than Simpkins' or Creasy's, the sweetness takes the sting out of the 'shine.

And bartenders aren't the only folks experimenting.

The kitchen folks at Noble's Grille in Winston-Salem, N.C., feature Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon in their shrimp and grits recipe, and Blue 5 in Roanoke, Va., uses Catdaddy as a "moonshine glaze" for the joint's ribs and chicken.

Piedmont Distillers' Michalek says his consumers live as far away as Australia.

"They'll pass through the South, grab a bottle, try it and like it," explains Michalek. "Then they'll call up and ask us to send them more, which legally we can't do [because of state and federal laws]. But they find ways of getting it!"

And while products like Johnson's, Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey and Catdaddy are available in liquor stores, corn liquor still carries a Mason-jar mystique of mischief hidden under the kitchen sink.

Even with some serious marketing behind it, the legal products are hardly mainstream.

Dean explains: "Working with 100-proof is really hard to mix down. You've got to be careful with this stuff. You're going to need a cab after even one of these. The trend right now is lower-proof, flavored liquors. People can drink a lot more of those than a cocktail made with moonshine."

For Creasy, the approach started with cachaca (a fermented sugar cane liquor) but her tastes moved quickly to tequila-type drinks like mojitos and margaritas she felt mirrored the taste of corn liquor. For Simpkins, the canvas was wide open; he used everything from fresh ginger to muddled Fuji apples.

"Real moonshine is very esoteric but I didn't find it all that difficult to work with," Simpkins said.

Creasy and Simpkins agree that the real stuff makes a better cocktail.

"I liked working with it because it actually has a flavor," explains Simpkins.

And if you taste a whiff of the real stuff, you can usually sniff a bourbon lurking somewhere in the jar, even though most true 'shines — unlike bourbon — are aged for less than 30 days (which is even a selling point on the Georgia Moon label).

And while some legal 'shines come complete with recipes like Johnson's Pole Sitter lemon drop-esque shot, don't expect moonshine to bask in sunlight anytime soon.

Because of its high proof and murky mystique, moonshine may forever be restricted to the back of the refrigerator in an aged fruit jar.