Yet when we meet over a video call, I get the feeling his modelling career is at the back of his mind. Instead, our conversation turns to harvesting seaweed, tracking down rare eucalyptus, and the differences between rose and jasmine when they hit the tongue.
For the past five years, Scott has been building something very different from a fashion career. Goldenbird, his ready-to-drink cocktail brand, is not just another celebrity backed venture. Scott is its founder, creative director, and sole recipe developer.
Back home in Australia, Scott’s obsession with flavor goes back to his childhood. “I was raised in a really poor family, just with my mum in the countryside of Melbourne,” he says. “Money was non-existent, and food was not great, so I started making things for myself. I wanted tasty food, so I’d constantly be out picking things, smelling things. It became an obsession.
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“In summer, I’d spend days foraging native botanicals, flowers, and seasonal produce. I’d supply restaurants with Mirabell plums, strawberry eucalyptus, sea blight, samphire, seaweeds, all kinds of things. I had a lot of time to think about how I could utilize those ingredients and I’d go home and start tinkering around with them, whether in cooking or making drinks.”
Today, Scott’s tinkering happens on a larger scale. At various points, his garage has been packed with drying eucalyptus, jars of botanical extractions, and the occasional unwelcome spider colony. His fridge currently holds around 70 macerations and experiments, and the family car has been relegated to the roadside.
When his interest in flavor combinations grew beyond experimentation, his first stop wasn’t cocktails, but Scotch whisky. He drew up a business plan and sent his partner, Brioney Prier, to Scotland to meet with master distillers, but nothing stuck.
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“We wanted to make whisky more fun and enjoyable,” he says. “But whisky is a long game. It takes a long time to make a small amount of money We were always going out and drinking cocktails anyway, so we asked, why aren’t we just doing cocktails?”
Scott’s journey eventually came full circle in Grasse, the perfume capital of southern France. There, he found Comte de Grasse, a self-described “liquor tech” company that was distilling spirits using techniques borrowed from fragrance extraction.
Prier, Goldenbird’s co-founder, recalls their first meeting with the team. “We didn’t want a cookie cutter product from a contract bottler,” she says. “We wanted something that really spoke to craftsmanship. When we met the team in Grasse it just hit the nail on the head.”
That team includes master distiller Marie-Anne Contamin, a woman with decades of experience in sensory development. When Scott first arrived with bags of foraged delicacies and 60 recipe concepts, she encountered ingredients she had never worked with before. “It was a really meeting of minds,” Prier says. The way Jarrod layers his recipes with flavor is exactly how perfumes are constructed.”
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Of all his original recipe concepts, Romance Apocalypse sits closest to Scott’s heart. The website describes it as a “sexy bouquet of French lavender, damask rose, and Egyptian jasmine combined with fruity acidic hints of strawberry eucalyptus”. It’s vibrant pink color, shimmering through the fragrance inspired bottle, would not look out of place on a perfume counter.
“I love floral drinks,” he says, “and I wanted to create something that was like getting slapped in the face by a bunch of flowers. Usually, when you get a floral drink, it only uses one flower, because they’re such intense flavors. Rose hits you straight away on the nose. Jasmine has more of a honey note. Then you’ve got lavender, which is earthy and floral.”
Scott worked on the balance drop by drop. It took 160 variations, and then a few more on top of that. The result is a drink that unfolds in layers, much like a fragrance. Even the color comes entirely from flower extracts.
By the end of development, Scott was so attuned to the recipe that he could detect even the slightest misalignment. One of the first batches from Comte de Grasse had used the wrong type of coconut water. Scott picked it up instantly. “I just knew it was wrong,” he says. “They had used a brand of coconut water that had 5.5 grams less sugar, and I just knew it didn’t taste right.”
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Scott finalized a few recipes with Comte de Grasse, but Goldenbird was still a long way from launch. It still needed a website, and licenses to sell in markets with very different legal requirements. But when Scott came across Global Spirit Masters, he couldn’t wait. “We had finished the R&D and I just thought, why not?” he says.
The judges were intrigued. Goldenbird arrived with no public profile, no launch plan, yet the drinks stood out. Several of Scott’s entries picked up gold medals, including Romance Apocalypse, proving that his garage experiments could hold their own against leading mixologists.
Justification secured, Scott doubled down on his efforts to launch Goldenbird only to find that ready to drink cocktails take just as long to bring to market as Scotch whisky. It wasn’t just his modelling career or regulatory hurdles, but the arrival of Scott and Prier’s first baby that sent Goldenbird into hibernation. Now officially in launch phase, Goldenbird offers its four award-winning recipes with another two launching in April. Those six will be Goldenbird’s first permanent collection with seasonal variations to follow.
Looking ahead, Scott already has plans for the brand’s next chapter. “I’d like to see, years down the line, we will eventually have a flagship bar somewhere,” Scott says. “For now, we’ve been doing pop ups through Fashion Week, and we’ve had a lot of interest.”
Some of Goldenbird’s earliest customers are cocktail bars, which have been buying Scott’s concoctions in bulk to serve as a base for recipes on their menus. They take the pre-bottled mixtures, apply bar-appropriate tweaks, and serve. That, Scott says, is where more cocktail bars will go.
“I think a lot of bars now are using pre-batching,” he says. “You get a high-quality liquid with stability and consistency without the hassle of trying to teach someone how to get it right. It plays into a faster service, reduces staff costs… it’s a win, win for everyone. It’s not everywhere, but it’s going to be the way of the future.”
Scott’s claims ring true with at Tayēr + Elementary, a London bar that consistently finishes in the top ten of the World’s 50 Best Cocktail Bars. There, they have adopted pre-batching of non-perishable ingredients not just to speed up service or reduce costs, but because some of their recipes have become so complex, they’d be impossible to make to order.
A spokesperson for the bar told The World of Fine Spirits: “We batch because we use highly concentrated distillates, extracts and flavorings which when broken down often contain less than 1ml per individual serving (we measure to 0.25ml). It would be impractical and literally impossible to measure this in service.”
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No matter where Goldenbird goes, it will remain a deeply personal pursuit for Scott, who has not only developed the recipes but designed the fragrance-inspired bottles. He’s not just the face of the brand, but the substance behind it.