Beer Spotlight!

Stillwater Business

$15.99 for the 12oz four-pack cans
Imperial Stout with Molasses and Muscovado Sugar

Brian Strumke, the pioneering “gypsy brewer” behind Stillwater (formerly Stillwater Artisanal Ales) is nomadic no more.

Back in 2010, Strumke was working a day job in a cubicle farm and homebrewing at night. However — a former record producer and DJ — Strumke never abandoned his identity as an artist. Then one day, a mutual friend brought the owner of 12 Percent Imports over to Strumke’s kitchen to try his beer. (Seriously, who has that life? “Hey, I just happen to be tight with the head a movie studio. You mind if I bring him over to watch your student film?”)

The 12 Percent guy (Brian Ewing) was really impressed, and Strumke saw an opportunity through his music producing lens. Just like when he had made songs at different studios and released them through a record company, he could make small batches of beer at different breweries and release them through 12 Percent. Strumke with his Stillwater Artisanal Ales became one of the early brewers without a brewery. A year later, he was one of the most famous. (No joke. There was even talk of a Strumke television show.)

Nine years and beers and breweries went by, and by 2020 Strumke was regularly contract brewing with 2 Roads Brewing in Connecticut and was about to close on a multi-million dollar deal for a Brooklyn Stillwater brewpub. At the last moment, he dropped the deal because, “Something didn’t feel right.” A few weeks later, we were all uncomfortably intimate with the term “global pandemic.” Strumke’s life of travel and brews and parties and different people and places had ground to a COVID halt. Now in Seattle, with a new apartment and a fading marriage, Strumke was forced to rethink what Stillwater would be.

Stillwater now has a home with Talking Cedar, a brewery, distillery, and gastropub just south of Seattle that was extra open to the arrangement having had the bad luck to have opened in 2020. (Can we all say #$%@ COVID-19!) There, Strumke brews Stillwater beers, enjoying a greater amount of brewing control than he had working with 2 Roads.

Business (“No gimmicks or flavorings, strictly business.”) is an imperial stout brewed with molasses and muscovado sugar. Muscovado sugar is a beet or cane sugar that is less refined than white sugar or even brown sugar, so much so that a fair amount of molasses remains in it. So really, you’re brewing an imperial stout with molasses and molasses. Muscovado sugar also cannot be metabolized by beer yeast, so it remains in the beer rather than being converted to alcohol. Thus, like with lactose, you can use muscovado sugar to sweeten your beer.

So, it turns out that a slightly sweetened molasses and molasses stout is a good thing. The sweetness balances out with the dusky, smokey, earthy toffee of the molasses, both of them rounding out the malt of the stout. The key is the “slight” sweetening. This isn’t a dessert stout. It’s a smooth, chocolaty stout with just a hint of fruitiness and hops on the finish. Delightful. We predict you’ll say, “Thirteen percent ABV? Well, thank goodness it’s only a 12oz can.” They you’ll drink it and say, “Darn! Why is it only a 12oz can!?!”

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