Today we’d like to introduce you to Rob Forster.
Hi Rob, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
My partners and I founded Wonderbird Spirits in Taylor, Mississippi — just down the road from Oxford and Ole Miss — about two years ago.
I was a corporate lawyer for fifteen years in NY and LA and felt a strong inclination to move into something more creative and entrepreneurial at this stage of life — my partners made similar left turns after corporate careers in bigger cities.
What joined us were connections to OM, a love of spirits, and perhaps most importantly a shared vision to create something of surpassing quality from rural Mississippi. It started as a dream but — with some true white-knuckle moments along the way — has now become a reality.
A thrill about which we are gratified, excited, and most certainly grateful.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
They are innumerable. None of us had a background in distilling, thus a central challenge was learning that craft from the ground up.
When we chose rice as our fermentation substrate (we are a “grain-to-glass” producer generating our own base alcohol), we were forced to learn the rudiments of centuries-old sake-making practices, another huge learning curve.
We designed our own building and built as much of it as possible with our own three sets of hands and thus endured a year and a half of construction, learning the hard way, for example, that waiting for the right day to pour concrete can sometimes take not days or even weeks but months.
And then of course, as a business that began just eight months prior to a pandemic, we struggled through the economic shuttering that took place across the country due to COVID-19. Starting a small business is not for the faint of heart!
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
To start with, we are only the third distillery in the world using rice to make gin; the other two are in Japan.
But going beyond that, we have aspired to a very high standard in every element of this project from the first day. For all three of us, the vision was always this: To make something world-class from a place that is often portrayed as retrograde in the national dialogue.
So, for example, we scoured the state of Mississippi looking for a singular agricultural product to be used as our fermentation substrate, landing — with significant luck — on the jasmine rice grown at Two Brooks Farm in Tallahatchie County. This required us to learn the rudiments of sake-making along with the other significant set of challenges before us, an education that led us to cultivate koji in-house and which now weekly fills the distillery with the nutty, enchanting aroma of that mold spore.
We walked this property with a professional forager, discovering over six boiling hot July hours about fifteen possible ingredients for our botanical bill, two of which — red clover tops and fresh loblolly pine shoots — made it into our final recipe.
And then of course was the day we realized that to express our botanicals as precisely as we wanted to — to get the purest essence of each — we needed to distill them individually in babysat micro-distillations, which added countless hours to our production process but yielded a far superior, more layered spirit which tends to reveal itself in stages.
So maybe we end by discussing what matters most to you and why?
Excellence and consistency are our north stars. We have taken no corners in any element of this business. Why?
Because this gin and brand are extensions of who the three of us are as people and we knew from the outset that we would get one chance at something like this.
We have put hearts into — and sweated over — every detail along the way.
Pricing:
- Wonderbird No. 61 (original) — MSRP $45
- Wonderbird No. 97 Magnolia Experimental — MSRP $75
Contact Info:
- Email: rob@wonderbirdspirits.com
- Website: www.wonderbirdspirits.com
- Instagram: @wonderbirdspirits
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderbirdspirits/
