Stillwell Brewing Company

Exceptional Craft Beer on Kempt Road

BY LINDSAY WICKSTROM
PHOTOS MICHELLE DOUCETTE

If you look at a typical craft beer shelf these days, the options are endless: mocha stouts, cherry sours, mango smoothies, pumpkin ales and jalapeno lagers. Then there are the IPAs, from champagne to milkshake, knock-you-on-your-ass to barely alcoholic.

Many of us remember when craft beer was scarce and predominantly based on the English styles that had taken hold of the east coast: pales, browns, reds, bitters, and good ‘ol fashioned English IPAs.

But the craft beer craze was approaching with lightning speed.

Chris Reynolds, co-founder and brewer at Stillwell, lived in Toronto then, as did his sister, Laura MacDonald, and her British partner, Andrew Connell. Those two had met working at The White Horse on Parson’s Green, an acclaimed beer bar in London, England, and now Connell was managing Toronto’s Bar Volo, probably the most influential beer bar in Canada.

The group decided to open a beer bar in Halifax, which still needed a dedicated craft beer bar. Plus, Halifax was home to Reynolds and MacDonald, who grew up drinking growlers of Propeller.

They opened Stillwell Beer Bar in 2013, when there were still only seven breweries in Nova Scotia, and soon enjoyed national acclaim. Soon Stillwell Beergarden and Stillwell Freehouse followed that early success. The Stillwell brand was a thriving kingdom supporting the now 70+ breweries in the province. They even started brewing and selling their own beer, if only as a hobby project rather than a serious commercial enterprise.

“I couldn’t really find any mixed-fermented barrel-aged traditional saison on the market here so that’s why we started making it,” says Reynolds. He could brew small batches at Propeller on Gottingen Street, which had capacity after shifting its production to Burnside.

“But they are so labour-intensive, time-intensive, and anti-commercial that I couldn’t keep making those forever. And to be honest, my tastes have changed,” says Reynolds. “What I really want in a beer is a beer that I don’t have to think about. I want to be pleased enough to order another one.”

He started making pilsner for the same reason he’d begun making saisons. He had enjoyed traditional pilsners at festivals in the States and Europe and felt a gap in the market here.

A pilsner is a type of lager (named after the Czech city of Pilsen) marked by its spicy and hoppy character. All beers are either lagers or ales, the main difference being the type of yeast used. Ales are brewed with top-fermenting yeast that operates at warmer temperatures, whereas lagers use bottom-fermenting strains requiring colder temperatures. The lager yeasts perform their magic (eating sugars and excreting alcohol and CO2) more slowly, resulting in a light, clean beer (like Budweiser).

“If you compare [traditional pilsners] to all the budget lager that we grew up drinking … It’s much more vibrant … like all craft beer is. But there’s maybe a bit more refinement in a pilsner or lager, and maybe that’s because it takes so long to make. I mean, it’s two months in a tank minimum, really.”

Since lagers are so resource-intensive to make, and Reynolds had access to only one tank at Propeller, he couldn’t produce pilsner on a large scale. But when the pandemic happened, and all of the Stillwell locations closed, Reynolds and his partners realized they would have to do the now-classic “pandemic pivot,” so they decided to turn Reynolds’ hobby project into a real business.

Last August, they moved into their Kempt Road digs, where they installed a German brewpub system with a greater capacity to focus on lager-style beers.

**Grant Chisholm, Paul Atwood, Chris Reynolds, Nikki Lockington, Richard Fewell**

“The craft beer world is maturing,” says Reynolds, alluding to advancements in technology and knowledge. “It’s possible now to make something that was maybe previously only possible to make in a bigger facility.”

Knowledge of the craft from two of the most renowned lager producing countries, Germany and Czechia, is now more accessible. The Czech government even hosts brewers from across the world on educational tours.

“We were invited to go this past April,” says Reynolds. “So I went on a Czech beer mission for a full week. Fourteen-hour days of malt houses, suppliers, pubs, massive breweries and learning how they do it (with a translator). Trying to get that knowledge … you can’t get it from forums.”

When Reynolds (and almost every other homebrewer) originally learned how to make beer, it was on online forums based on British methods. So, he says, much of North American craft beer is based on British-style infusion brewing—a single-step infusion of water and mash left in an insulated container at a specific temperature for a particular time.

Continental brewing, says Reynolds, uses a different method called decoction mashing. This process extracts some of the mash and brings it to a boil in a separate pot before adding it back. It raises the overall temperature, extracting more flavour from the malt and creating a Maillard reaction (i.e. the deliciousness that comes from browning things).

Decoction requires additional equipment, but the kit at Stillwell Brewing can handle that too. Reynolds claims that it lends more “heart” to the malt character of his beers, and he uses this method for all of the beers at Stillwell.

Reynolds also incorporates spunding valves, which allow the brewer to control the amount of CO2 lost during the fermentation period (when building gasses need to be let off, typically by a blowoff tube). Spunding allows the beer to absorb the CO2 gradually, so Reynolds doesn’t have to force carbonate his beer during packing. He says spunding better preserves the delicate aromas in the beer and improves the head.

His efforts to produce the perfect beer don’t end there. Reynolds is also using a canning technology called counter-pressure filling. Cans are usually filled bottom-to-top by a tube, similar to how you would fill a growler.

“The beers ends up foaming a lot which means the natural aromatics are just going to escape, and you lose a bit of carbonation as well,” explains Reynolds.

Counter-pressure filling solves this problem by sealing and pressurizing the can so that no oxygen can get in.

This unique mix of tech (decoction, spunding, and counter-pressure) results in crisp, flavourful beers with nice lacing (the residue left on the side of the glass from the foam, which is indicative of quality and freshness). It allows Stillwell to make high-quality lagers pretty much on par with European imports—but fresher because they are local.

Stilly Pils (a pilsner) is their flagship beer. It is crisp and clean, and I would be content if this were the only beer I could drink for the rest of my life.

Fortunately, Stillwell is also making two more beers: a Kölsch (lagered ale) and a Best Bitter, which Reynolds says is distinct from the Extra Special Bitters that have long been popular in Halifax.

“If you go over to England and you order a pint of bitter,” says Reynolds, “what slides across the table at you is something that’s way lower in alcohol and way paler
in colour.”

It’s the “everyday beer” Reynolds aspires to produce. Traditional everyday beers that don’t need to be “improved” by someone’s “take” on them. “We were doing a bit of soul searching and [realized our] mission of being a steward of a style and not trying to put our personality into the beer,” he says.

He also plans to make a Czech Dark Lager and Czech Pale Lager inspired by his recent pilgrimage to Czechia. For now, the aspiration is to make Stilly Pils a household name. You can expect to see it showing up on a tap near you, and it will be available at the NSLC this spring.

But Reynolds has big plans for the brewery space, too. He plans to install a vintage hi-fi system and host DJs, record nights, Disco Sundays and various pop-ups and collabs. The tasting bar, which will have taps for each of the five styles, is constructed of materials that defuse sound, benefiting the acoustics.

“Ostensibly, the theme of the tasting room is beer, of course, but the other theme, which is my attempt to get people out to deepest Kempt Road, is a listening bar.”

The brewery is open daily for pick-ups and chill time, but weekends will be prime time for your tasting and listening pleasure. While you should trek to Kempt Road for the full experience, Reynolds hopes his beers are meeting people where they are.

Stillwell Brewing Company