Slow-Fashioned: Wonderbird Spirits
Just outside of Oxford, Mississippi sits Wonderbird Spirits, a standout business with a slow-fashioned method for distilling gin.
Their grain-to-glass method is a labor of love, taking about 20 days from start to finish of a batch, with techniques borrowed from traditional sake making.
Wonderbird’s Start
Chan Harlow, one of three owners of Wonderbird Spirits, is a Mississippi native. Though he left the state as a young adult, his yearning to create in the food and beverage business led him to Oxford.
“I always wanted to move back to Mississippi at some point, to start a business there,” Harlow said. “Many people leave the state and never come back. I wanted to come back and help the state, at least for a period of time, and try to grow a business there and then make it a Mississippi business that people could be proud of.”
Along with his business partners, Rob Forster and Thomas Alexander, Harlow launched Wonderbird Spirits in 2019, a distillery specializing in field-to-bottle gin.
“There’s a lot of creative freedom with gin,” Harlow said.“You can make it express the terroir of where you're from. You know, the only rule with gin is it has to have juniper in it. Otherwise, the world's your oyster.”
There are ways to shortcut in the industry, but Wonderbird Spirits is involved in every step of the process.
“I wanted to truly make every part of it,” Harlow said. “A lot of these liquor companies are more like branding, marketing companies. They bottle it, put their label on it, and they call it theirs. I didn't want any part to do with that. I wanted to actually craft something.”
The Process
It all starts in Sumner, Mississippi, where Wonderbird sources jasmine rice from Two Brooks Farm.
“We grow a mold on it, a Japanese mold called Koji,” Harlow said. “Koji is used in all sake production. It's also used to make tofu, soy sauce, miso –a lot of Japanese food products. Obviously, it's a food-safe mold that grows on grain, and it creates really wonderful umami flavors and smells.”
After letting the Koji grow for 48 hours, the rice is frozen to stop the growing process. It’s mixed with regular jasmine rice and cooked for 12 hours.
Koji provides an enzyme which breaks down the starch in rice that prevents it from fermenting, turning it into a mixture of sweet porridge. It is combined with yeast and allowed to sit for seven days to ferment.
From there, the liquid is distilled, bringing the alcohol content from 13 or 14% ABV to 45%. The ‘low wine’ obtained from this process is then distilled 20 more times, bringing the ABV up to 94%. Now, the ‘base spirit’ is ready to be turned into gin.
Wonderbird Spirits uses a method of making gin, dry vapor distillation, in which botanicals hang in a basket above the base spirit as it is heated up.
“The alcohol vaporizes at about 173 degrees, and that hot alcohol vapor rises going through the botanical, extracting flavor as it does so, and out comes your gin,” Harlow said.
Many distilleries stop there with their gin, but Wonderbird’s process is more intricate. Instead of infusing all of their botanicals together, they repeat the vaporization with each botanical separately. Then, they combine based on the recipe.
“During our recipe development we created a flavor library of 40-plus botanicals to start tinkering with, and we were distilling each one by itself on a small lab still, and taking a cut every 50 milliliters,” Harlow said.
“We realized that the best essence of each botanical comes out at a different point in distillation. So to achieve the highest quality gin we possibly could, we needed to do them separately.”
The Result
As the only rice-based gin produced in the Western Hemisphere, Wonderbird’s product is a unique offering.
The gin can be found on the shelves of liquor stores and in bars across the country, concentrated in the Southeast.
Fans can also visit the distillery to experience Wonderbird Spirits in a new way. The company offers tours and tastings each week for visitors, as well as a special cocktail experience on Thursday evenings.
“It's an intimate, 10-person seating, reservation only.” Harlow said. “It just offers great cocktails to highlight what we're doing with the gins.”
For an at-home Wonderbird Gin cocktail, use it in GenTeal’s The Range Campfire Cocktail recipe.
