The rice at Two Brooks Farm begins beneath a foot of water in the Mississippi Delta. Crawfish slip between the rows, and thousands of ducks and geese gather in the shallows. Eventually, that rice culminates in something entirely unexpected: hundreds of corked bottles of gin in Taylor, Mississippi.
From start to finish, the journey takes months. Jasmine rice is planted in the fields each spring, tended through the summer and harvested in the fall before it’s milled, sorted, bagged and boxed. From there, thousands of pounds are hauled south to Wonderbird Spirits in Taylor, where the grain is fermented, distilled and bottled.
The Wagners’ Two Brooks Farm sits in Minter City, where father-son team Mike and Lawrence Wagner carry on ten generations of family farming. The fields stretch between 3,500 and 4,000 farmable acres, about half of which is farmed for eight varieties of rice.
“It used to just be a swamp out here,” Lawrence said. “Nobody wanted to touch it because of the soil type, so (my dad) bought it … and he just had to figure out how to make it work for him. That’s how he landed on rice and soybeans.”
The farm is bordered by rivers, and the soil is a heavy, gumbo-like clay. Each winter, the flat rice fields are flooded to suppress invasive weeds and to create a habitat for water fowl. Seeds are dropped from the air into the standing water by plane.
Each harvest yields about 8 million pounds of rice, from black and sushi rice to jasmine and arborio. After milling the rice, about 4 million pounds remain and are sold to food distributors and online buyers across the south east. Millions of pounds are stored in large grain bins sprawled across the front of the farm.
Mike purchased the farm in the early 1990s, and Lawrence came home to help run it around 2016 after graduating from Missisippi State University.
“I remember when we were first starting, I just didn’t know how we were going to set ourselves apart because back then, to me, rice was just rice,” Lawrence said. “I started eating it and I remember going back to another variety of jasmine sold on the coast and … it blew my mind because it was the first time I noticed a real, real difference.”
The difference eventually made its way about 150 miles northeast, where Wonderbird Spirits now turns Two Brooks rice into gin. It’s the only known gin distiller in the county to use rice as a base, and it’s one of few in the world.
Co-founders Chand Harlow, Rob Forster and Thomas Alexander built the distillery from the ground up, beginning in 2017. The group set out to use Mississippi agriculture to create a grain to glass gin.
“We scoured Mississippi looking for something really cool to ferment on,” Forster said. “We tried a lot of heirloom corn, thought about sweet potatoes, but it was really that jasmine rice from the Delta that created that really clean, silky aromatic thing.”
The process takes about 20 days. Rice is poured into a mash pot and heated, before more rice, infused with a Japanese mold called koji, is added. After a long cook and a week of fermentation, the mash turns into a traditional Japanese rice wine called sake, which is then distilled about 20 times before botanicals are added.
A single mash of 1,300 pounds of rice yields about 600 bottles of gin.
“The reason we do that is not because we like to work 10 times harder for no reason,” Harlow said. “… Our singular goal here is to make the best gin we possibly can, and that’s the way we feel we have to do it.”
The flagship gin, called “No. 61,” was the distillery’s first recipe, blending ten botanicals including pine needles gathered from the woods behind the stillhouse and red clover harvested from the pasture out front. Bottles are corked, labeled and numbered by hand.
While most distilleries create a neutral base spirit for gin, Wonderbird leaves in the flavor Two Brooks’ rice offers.
“We go through so much trouble to make this great rice base that we want to keep a little bit of the flavor elements of the rice,” Harlow said. “… The flavor was unreal and super smooth and (has) a silky mouth feel.”
From its first bottles in 2019, Wonderbird has grown to distribution in eight states, with hopes of reaching a dozen by 2026.
Everyone seems to agree: rice is hard to work with.
“Rice is very labor intensive and time intensive and sensitive, so a lot of folks don’t want to deal with it,” Wagner said. “… But my thoughts right now are I’m going to do it until I can’t, until I’m bankrupt or dead.”
“It’s a very hands-on, labor intensive, but beautiful process,” Harlow said.
Still, it finds its way from flooded fields teeming with wildlife to tasting rooms serving martinis.
“We’re not in the getting drunk business,” Forster said. “We’re in the storytelling business and the connection business and the making beautiful fun things business.”
Wonderbird Spirits offers tours of their Taylor, Mississippi location, and bookings are available at their website wonderbirdspirits.com.
Two Brooks Farm offers tours of their Minter City, Mississippi, farm, which can be requested by emailing [email protected]. The Two Brooks storefront is located at its office in Sumner, located at 129 East Court Street. Their rice is also sold at Baked at Broussards in Columbus.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY CADENCE HARVEY