What happens when an entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles, an IT consultant and a financial manager walk onto a plot of land in Taylor? For Chand Harlow, Rob Forster and Tom Alexander, it’s Wonderbird Spirits, the only grain-to-glass gin distillery in the state.
The trio found its way into the gin business through personal connections from college and a desire to find a field that would let them leave the monotony of corporate jobs.
“(Rob and I) were roommates a long time ago in college, and we’ve known each other for a very long time, best men at each other’s weddings kind of thing, and we had been talking about leaving our corporate gigs and doing something more entrepreneurial and getting to spend more time with our families,” Alexander said.
Before Wonderbird, Alexander was an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, Forster was an IT consultant and Harlow worked in finance. Alexander and Forster were introduced to Harlow through a mutual friend and discovered that they all had a mutual vision to leave their ‘corporate gigs.’
The trio found it difficult to brand and name their new gin distillery because most names were already taken. The idea for ‘Wonderbird’ as a name for the gin came suddenly after a break from trying to brand the product.
“We had decided to take a break and stop going crazy thinking about it, and then I went to Tom’s one afternoon to pick up some keys and saw that he had a Birds of Mississippi book sitting on his coffee table that was fairly worn and looked after,” Forester said. “I said, ‘Have you been studying birds for the name?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ then I said, ‘Because I have too.’”
Harlow, Forster and Alexander took the sudden appearance of Birds of Mississippi as a ‘kick from the universe’ and decided on the name ‘Wonderbird’ to evoke optimism, good feelings and hope.
Wonderbird gin is made from a jasmine variety of rice grown at Two Brooks Farms in Sumner and is one of three distilleries in the world that uses rice to make gin. The other two are in Japan.
The distillery is home to a cat named Koji, who shares the name of a Japanese mold spore that is soaked, steamed and mixed with rice to create the gin. After the rice is cooked, it is put into fermenters for seven days, which creates 15% alcohol Asahi beer.
The liquid is then pumped into a still to have its alcohol stripped, which creates a base spirit. The spirit is then put in vapor distillation stills and combined with ten different botanicals, that give the gin its flavor.
“Most distilleries in the world do what’s called a ‘single-shot method’ where they combine all of their botanicals into the gin basket … they combine all of their botanicals at one time, heat up their alcohol and the vapors go through the botanicals and extract flavor,” Harlow said. “We do everything through dry vapor distillation the same way, but we do each botanical individually.”
A batch of Wonderbird gin takes around ten times as long to produce as a normal batch of gin because each batch is run through ten different distillations with each botanical. It takes around 20 days to produce a batch, and each batch produces around 600 bottles.
“The reason we do that is because it allows us to have greater control over the quality of each one,” Harlow said. “It’s a lot more work, and it’s a bit of a storage issue, but we feel it’s the way we have to do it to make the best gin we can.”
Several university development executives recently held an event at the distillery. Forster said that the university is the common thread that brought the trio together because they all have deep family connections to the university.
“We all kind of came to Oxford through these deep family connections. Ole Miss had a big meet and greet here two weeks ago,” Forster said. “We gave them an introduction to our distillery, and I said to them, ‘without Ole Miss this would not have happened.”
Tommy Bruce, manager of Star Package Store on Jackson Avenue, said that Wonderbird has been a popular item on the store’s shelves since they began carrying it in May. Bruce said that they have sold an average of five to six cases per month since they began carrying the alcohol.
“We’ve ordered more of that than we have the other stuff,” Bruce said. “It’s local and everybody wants to try it.”
Wonderbird is made in Mississippi from the ground up. The rice is grown in the Delta and the gin is distilled and bottled in North Mississippi.
“The important thing to us, instating this business was doing something that we were passionate about doing and doing it at a very high level and making a product that the people of this state could own and feel proud of and feel like something world-class was coming from right here,” Forster said.
