WONDERBIRD SPIRITS

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW FAULKNER

Answering the Yoknapatawpha County (pronounced just like it’ s spelled) is the setting for almost all the books by the great author William Faulkner (no relation). call Substituting the name Jefferson for the county seat of Oxford, Mississippi, and similar names for almostrecognisable places, the novelist names one real place – Taylor, Mississippi – in his otherwise this town of 40,000 residents has an elevated food and beverage scene, which includes It also wasn’t long before Forster heard about Chand Harlow, an Oxford resident and Mississippi native who had a similar dream

How three friends were drawn to a mythical Mississippi county to launch

In Go Down, Moses, Lucas Beauchamp hid his moonshine still every dawn in the creek bed

in Yoknapatawpha County – but unlike the county, Wonderbird is real, located fewer than 10 miles south of Faulkner’s Rob Forster felt drawn to Oxford after his father, an Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) graduate and longtime resident, passed

Forster said,

“I experienced one of those taps that you get from life every once in a yourself in the mirror and be honest: you should take your family, move to Oxford, and

He ditched his career as a movie-industry attorney and headed out to Oxford, not knowing quite yet what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, but that he wanted to

“[Harlow] had this as a burning passion since he was in his teens, to start a distillery not trying to make a $20 bottle of hooch to

The third partner, Tom Alexander, was Forster’s roommate at the University of Virginia 25 years ago, and best man at his job in Austin, Texas, and moved to Oxford to

you very well know, once you’ ve introduced that fore-note of juniper, you are then at liberty to truly create something completely and utterly unique, unlike anything else that

all three of us wanted to unleash creativity that we had bottled in us in our corporate

For their base ingredient, the Wonderbird partners settled on jasmine rice, which they source from Two Brook Farms in Sumner in Tallahatchie County, a family-owned

“What we wanted to do was buy a local agricultural product, and then turn it into our base alcohol, and then learn how to really long time… and there’s gonna be a lot of experimenting, and a lot of failing, and a

The jasmine rice gave their base spirit the warm, viscous mouthfeel and natural aromatics that support the other botanicals elegantly, but it is also slow to convert fermentation, they attend sake-making workshops, treating the grain the way a sake brewer would, breaking down the starches

“I really take my hat off to Tom and Chand “Those guys cracked some pretty arcane

Harlow and Alexander learned a technique that reduced the fermentation time from 30-40 days down to about eight days, which

The jasmine rice gave their base spirit the warm, viscous mouthfeel and natural aromatics

involves heating the mash up to four very

After perfecting that technique, the next

we got up in the 60s, and we had a really the 80s, but we kept coming back to number

In addition to juniper, Wonderbird Spirits root, fresh Meyer lemon, lemongrass, black tellicherry peppercorn, rosemary, and pine and red clover tops (the particularly Mississippi ingredients), are foraged from

Homeopathically, red clover top is known in your bathwater is said to keep away grow all over medians and bridges and… highways all over northern Mississippi and

In constructing the recipe, these perfectionists don’t simply throw all of this in the pot or a basket and distil it, even though they have a still custom made ingredient comes over the still at different times, Wonderbird makes concentrated single-botanical spirits on small laboratory stills, making heads and tails cuts tailored by blending these distillates into the base in

Opening page: Wonderbird Gin No. 61 Previous pages: Co-founder Rob Forster at the distillery; The original Wonderbird Spirit These pages: Wonderbird Spirits in Taylor, Mississippi; Checking out the stills

release of the same gin that spends a few The wood sugars and vanillin relax and

The last of Wonderbird’s three gins is a from marketing trips during the pandemic, Forster couldn’t help but think of his home state’s ubiquitous magnolia trees, a symbol

“I live right off of Ole Miss campus, and I there one day, and kind of parked my car in a random corner of campus, and brought some shears with me, and plucked a few of those massive magnolia blossoms, and went just started coming out perfect, so we said, ‘Can we build a second gin? Can we build a new expression that showcases midsummer

Experimental Gin also contains coriander, tellicherry peppercorn and chinchona bark, but the unique character is magnolia, carrying the sweet fragrance of a summer shortly before Mississippi changed the received instant acclaim when Garden and Gun magazine named it overall winner in the

In the midst of the American craft distilling world going crazy over whiskey, three partners decided to make gin with a real sense of place and make it in a place not known for distilling (Mississippi was the last

“This project was all about us answering “not because we’re idealistic but because we felt, if we did it that way and answered those calls to our own satisfaction, good things