Stellum Spirits - An Interview with Will Schragis, Chief Sales & Innovation Officer

Hey everyone and welcome to Bourbon Bites. Welcome to this non-live stream premiere of my interview

with Stellum Spirits. I'm super excited about today's interview. I'm sorry I couldn't do it

live with you guys. I'm traveling today but if you're watching the replay, hey what's up? But

if you're live in the chat, I should be there too. So hopefully say hi to Cliffy. Cliffy say hi

All right. But I'm so excited to have on Will Shragus. Y'all previously saw him talking about

barrel bourbon, barrel rye, and barrel dovetail. Well, now he's here to talk about this incredible

new line of affordable, approachable bourbon and rye. So without further ado, please welcome

Will Shragas from Stellum Spirits. Will, thank you so much for being here today

Of course. Thank you so much for having me. And I know, I'm not sure if you'll cut it out or not

but you said barrel first. We don't want anyone to think that barrel's not going anywhere

I get that question a lot. That's the first question I'm getting these days is like, what's the relationship between the two and the relationship is that barrel craft spirits has

become the parent company of itself and stellum spirits um and the two brands uh are made by the

same people and have some of the same sensibilities but they have sort of different ethos about what

being a whiskey brand in america is like and uh whereas barrel was so or is so focused on what's

the best thing that we can make right now without any worry about consistency stellum was like a two-year-long project in figuring out how we could make something awesome

and cast strength that is always the same and uh it was only the sort of success of barrel and a lot

of the like lessons we learned from putting batches together that we were able to put something

together for stellum that we're like really confident is a consistent awesome cast strength

whiskey yeah for sure i was actually going to say so your title has changed since i last had you on

the show so previously you were the national director of barrel craft spirits but now your

title is what is chief sales officer and chief product innovation officer. Can you talk a little

bit about that? Like, is it the same thing? I can talk about it. My day to day is exactly the same

So actually with Stellum, I am doing more of the sales role than I have ever done before

because it's the first time that we've ever launched a totally new thing. And because of that

we've got like some street cred that we had to do years and years of like showing people that the

whiskey was awesome with barrel to get people excited. And with Stellum, we got to go like zero to 60 really quickly. I know it's popping up. A lot of people are talking about it in lots of

really good ways. So if someone's new to the brand, tell us a little bit about what Stellum is

So Stellum is a American whiskey company using the belief from Joe that bourbon and rye should

be at cask strength. But the reason Stellum is like loosely or not so loosely of the stars or

outer space themed is because Joe was a cold war baby and like it was the final frontier and we

wanted everything about Stellum to be like how can we be the best whiskey company right now looking

forward and not like oh we've we've you know followed the ancient west pier ways of doing

anything of doing things and that has to do with the way that we're blending it um and the fact

that it's a blend of straights and it's not from any one distillery um and that we're declassifying

lots of different ages back down into a non-age statement the way that I guess we've never really

done that with Barrel. We've always had an age statement, but we've always had a variety of different ages. But also in the way that we treat each other and the way that we treat consumers and

the way that we treat distributors, we want to work really well with people, but also we want

to make it clear that like we're bourbon drinkers, but we also like watch the Mandalorian and no one

in the company owns a horse. Too often I feel like the people that keep the lights on for a lot of

spirits companies get ignored in favor of the people that look and act and speak the way that

fit with the company's style. And like, it is my personal mission and Stellum's mission to make

sure that like the people that are into good cast strength bourbon, America is a very different

place. People look different. People speak different. People drink different things, but a lot of people drink bourbon. And like Barrel is so focused on we're going to keep our heads

down and we're going to make like the most interesting best whiskey we can. And Stellum is like, we're going to make the best whiskey we can at $54.99. And it's going to be just as

tasty as barrel, but it's not necessarily as complex as barrel. It's like designed to be

just deliver on what you like in bourbon and rye. Well, that kind of ties into, I have a question

from one of my patrons. My friend Adriana, she asks, why did you distinguish between, you know

the barrel name and Stellum? Like, because some people expected it to be like, you know

Stellum by barrel or something like that. Was there a reason for that? Yeah. So with everything

in the whiskey world, but I think especially when you have a young brand, you have the romantic

reasons for things and the business reasons for things. The romantic reason for the separation

is that Stellum cares a lot about being the same. You have no idea how much work in sourcing and

planning and tasting and testing and testing again with different barrels and all of those things

have gone into knowing we can recreate Stellum. Like I said, we released it this year

but we've worked on it for two and a half years. The business side of it is that we did not want

people to think of Stellum as baby barrel. It's of the same quality. It is just focused on being

the best in a tighter cannon rather than pushing the limits a little bit of blending the way that

barrel does. When Joe started barrel, I think that it started with, I just want to make cash

strength whiskey. I don't want to worry about other stuff. But what it really quickly became is like, I want to focus on making the best 79 or 84 or 99 or $120 bottle of whiskey and like

not going to go lower. And I'm just going to like really execute at that price

And Stellum is really wanting to execute, give them what they want, really good cast strength bourbon and rye at a different price

And so it's just a different way of thinking about it. And we don't want to hide the fact that they're made by the same company, but they're made with different blending styles and they're made with different ideas

They're trying to fit different places on your back bar. Since we answered that question, let's go ahead and dive into the bourbon, shall we

Let's see how it is. So you mentioned that there's consistency here

So the one that I have here is 114.98 proof. Is it always going to be that same proof

All of the Stellum blend is 114 or we call it core bourbon Okay It is 114 There are also a lot of single barrels in the Stellum world and they are all at cash strength at different proofs

But this is until we get to the point where we have to change it for some reason from a logistics perspective, it'll be 114.98

So the profile is built in what we call the tension between three Indiana mash bills, the 36% rye bourbon mash bill, the 21% rye bourbon mash bill

Everyone thinks they like 36%. Everyone likes the 21% more. But like that's the one that people go nuts for just in blind situations

And then the like secret, I think, is the 99% corn, 1% malted barley mash bill, which makes a really one-dimensional style of bourbon, but it's such a fat, buttery note

and that one's from Indiana as well yeah all three of those are from Indiana I've heard of

the other two but I'd not heard of that mashville um that makes up like 80 or so of Stellum the

other 20 is Kentucky bourbon and Tennessee bourbon and so it is a proprietary blend in one in some

ways but it's a proprietary blend that we have a lot of barrels of um and we're constantly back

filling 54.99 that's that's a great price point was there a reason that you targeted that price

point rather than you know something cheaper or obviously not more expensive because then it would be in the barrel territory why that price point i know this sounds conceded but we wanted to be

the best bottle at the price we felt like in at 55 there's a lot of bottles that are the same thing

as the 35 bottle and you just pay more and it's disappointing and we're we wanted to be the bottle

that's as good as the 100 bottle at 55 and we felt like we could nail that there specifically

on the nose for me the first thing i get is like a like a citrus or like a i almost want to say

like lemon zest or something it's very um not floral but it's it's fruity but like in a in a

tropical kind of way so i'm like thinking lemon oranges even maybe like pineapple you know like

when you do like you're peeling like a clementine or tangerine and it it gets it gets up at you

yeah that's what i get that's probably what i'm thinking i said lemon zest but something like a

cocktail or something but like but it's like it's not orange like a like a orange like a candied

orange peel it's like right right as you're it's like the fresh yeah i think we're getting the same

thing when you get as lemon nugget as orange yeah there's like a bait element like a bait good kind

of note to it too on the nose and i think i've already tasted it i kind of cheated but i think

it pulls it definitely comes out on the palate too what i really love about the bourbon is it smells like a intriguing complex bourbon the front palate of it is like as classic bourbon as you

can get oh yeah i was saying that the caramel typical caramel bourbon though caramel like

toasted oak uh like nutmeg like little bit of of sort of exotic spice but not a ton

What I find, the thing that it has, and we talk about this a lot, we want Stellum to be exactly what people are looking for and then a little bit better

Gotcha. That makes sense. So the part on the palate to me that is like, oh, is after you get the front palate that is just classic bourbon, it gets extremely wide and mouth-filling, and you get that butteriness of that 99% corn for a second

and so it like it's like bourbon stellum yeah that is what i love about it if you don't care about it it's just really good bourbon

but if you do care about it there's this moment that that'll that other bottles don't have i'm

gonna say i get a way more of like a toasted oak on the finish than i than i would have expected at

this price point i guess that people's fear was you know oh it's cheaper barrel it's gonna be

young but it does not taste you know it tastes just as good as i mean there's as old as 16 year

of barrels in this really yeah so the majority of it is a five six blend but there's a lot of

complexity built into it i feel that fear because when any company you know innovates downwards

the assumption is it's like okay you're getting rid of the stuff you couldn't use for the fancy

things right but we are the reason stellum is different is than barrel is we are not launching

an offshoot of barrel. It's its own idea. It's like the barrels for the most part are pipelined

separately. It just feels like baby barrel because of barrel. So a question, I guess

related to that, you mentioned, you know, these are non-age stated. Does that kind of, I assume

that adds to the fact that you can make it a little more affordable, more approachable, because barrel has always been very, you know, clear about what goes into the blend. Do you think

is it because of that that allows you to be at a lower price point? Does that help in any way

Yeah, so part of it is that if you're non-age statement, but you're a straight bourbon or a blend of straight bourbon, you have to be four years old

Because we have to blend to proof and to taste, we wanted to reserve the right to use something that was four years and 10 months old if we have to at any point

And so the practical reason for having non-age statement is it allows us, and I know every company that's non-age statement say this, but it allows us the most freedom to do the things that we want to do

What I have learned from being a collector and an employee separately and together is there are moments where if you give people the information they're looking for, they're excited about the bottle based on their preconceived notions about what's in it and not about what you're trying to say about the bottle

And we want people to appreciate it as Stellum bourbon, not Stellum five-year-old, mostly Indiana bourbon

the single barrels, which obviously will tell you the age statement if you want to know

but they don't have an age statement on the label either. And we may end up eating our words and

putting an age statement on it at some point, but we had a lot of conversations about it. And what we

felt like we want to take a stab at doing it the right way. And we're going to fight that fight as

hard as we can. And I think people will get behind that because of the pedigree of blending that the

company has. And because if you taste it, it doesn't taste like a young whiskey at all

taste like oh yeah no i think the perception that i've seen just among you know it's only been out

what like a month now but every time i hear people talk about it it's always in a very very positive

light but there but there were people that you know that that are barrel drinkers and they're

like you know is this for us is this for people that are new to the brand what do you want them

to get from stellum um as opposed to people that are new to the brand so i think that there's all

different types of people that are barrel fans but i think if there one sort of unifying characteristic of people that are really into barrel bourbon it is that they into bourbon It not just barrel There are very few people that are identity barrel drinkers If you like barrel bourbons you like all different types of whiskey because everything we make is different

And so we don't feel like we're leaving any barrel bourbon fans out with Stellum because we know

the 10, 15, 20, 30, 70, 200 other bottles that those people also have. And we want them to be

excited about stellum for the moments that stellum is the right thing stellum is like the whiskey

that like if i want to kind of quickly make myself a drink like it's designed for that not because

it's cheaper but because it's designed to just do what bourbon does really well do what rye does

really well all right well let's let's go ahead and try the rye so the rye is what's the proof on

this one this is that is not the right it's uh 116.24 i believe yes 116.24 and this this specifically

does say distilled in indiana now there is it all indiana rye for this one uh no so i think that the

sample label you got says indiana uh but the the product itself uh is indiana kentucky tennessee

gotcha so it's still a blend so it's just just still a blend but it is it is like major major

focused on the 95 rye 5 malted barley mash bill from indiana well you said the bourbon was also

like a heavy influence on the indiana yeah and the rye almost more of a heavy influence because

that mash bill is so iconic and like what people think of as good american rise a lot of people it's

like it's just that mash bill um there's also a like much more corn and malted barley focused

mash bill coming out of indiana that is used in this and then there's some kentucky rye and some tennessee rye which are much fatter less twangy less herbaceous styles of whiskey if you think

about like the old forester rye jim beam rye like those types of jack daniels rye all those they're

just like uh they're like slightly more balanced whiskey not as like spice driven whiskey and so

So what we really were going for with this rye is if you are a 95.5 chaser, an herb head, but for rye, not for other substances

Yeah. It's going to smell the way you want it to smell. I tasted this earlier and I wrote down some notes

The first thing I wrote on the notes is that it gives me a blast of everything I love about Indiana rye

So you literally just said what I thought. I guess the question that goes with that, I mean, do you think Stellum uses a lot more Indiana product than most barrel products, would you say

um so there are blends of barrel that are very indiana focused and there's some indiana single

barrels in barrel but uh stellum is definitely more in the indiana if you like indiana bourbon

and we all know what what distillery i'm talking about like and yeah it's really driven by that

but we want again it's like stellum it's like do you like that this is everything you want but

there's just a little bit more going on um because we have the capacity as a blending house to have

all the all of the different sources and we control all the blending ourselves and all the bottling ourselves yeah let's go ahead and try it cheers man cheers i will say it does drink a bit

different than what you would expect if you're just drinking like the straight up yeah it smells like 95.5 but it's it's fatter on the body it's like it's caramely to me like yeah i was gonna

say it's definitely sweeter like there's a lot more sweetness you're not hit with like the the

very distinctive like spices of a typical rye whiskey it's a lot more balanced sweeter and

typically with a lot of rise i feel like they drink hotter than their their proof point this

one doesn't I don't think I mean what is it one six one sixteen yeah yeah I think it drinks right

at that and I think that's an excellent proof point thank you I think it finishes a bit more

like a rye so it's not going to fool you you know you're not going to say like oh this there's no way this is a rye it's definitely a rye but I mean I'm a rye lover so I I think I appreciate

that about it but there are the characteristics that you typically get from the lower rye rye

mash bills out there yeah last week I was in Dallas I was kicking off Stellum with the Stellum

distributor in Texas is called Victory and they've got like a really cool really experienced spirits

nerdy sales team and everyone's drinking everyone's like like the mid the body of both of these is so

fat and we ended up having this like joke about Stellum being a dad bod whiskey I can get behind

that and that was like the joke of the whole presentation by the end of it it's like an hour

of talking about it and people kept being like like a dad bod um we had to reshape the bottle

of it and i think yeah it's funny because it's such a slim bottle but like but the the whiskey

itself it's like both of them are pretty like lean focused angular clear on the nose and then like

they get really mouth filling and fat in the middle and i think part of that comes from being

cast strength part of it comes from being non-chill filtered part of it comes being just well blended but also part of it comes from using really varied mash bills in all of them and so

So you can take barrels that give you the spread and the body that would be flabby and hot otherwise

But then you like rein them in with like more tannic and more spice driven barrels

For Stellum, what's interesting is with barrel, it'd be like putting together every blend to be that way

With Stellum, it's like putting together lines of pipeline of barrels to make sure that we can always get it over and over again

Let's talk a little bit about the single barrels. I mean, there's something like I don't have one in front of me, but tell me about that program

You know, what's going to be different? What's going to set those apart? The single barrel program is extremely simple. It's all Indiana, at least for now

The bourbon and the rye are both? Yeah, both Indiana and all at Cast Strength. The bottles, they're really, they're so cool. I wish I had one here, but we haven't started bottling them yet

It's the same looking bottle, but there's two bands above the label. And the first one has a name on it. There's three names to start

One is called Cygnus, which signifies the 36% Rye Mashville. One is called Lyra, which signifies the 21% Rye Mashville

And one is called Serpens, which is the Rye, the 95.5. And those are all groups of stars that are important to Joe

And so it's named after sort of celestial bodies. After the name, there's a two-digit code, a letter and then a number for each one

And that has to do with the palatization of the barrels in our warehouse

So with Cygnus for instance, there's Cygnus A1, Cygnus A2, Cygnus A3, and then through

nine, and then Cygnus B1, B2, so on and so forth. And the reason we do that is once we finished selecting barrels in a season or from a set of barrels we will move the cluster name and we start again And so you can know from your barrel like when it was selected what group it was selected from Also you can if you really

like a barrel, even though every single barrel is different, you can like see who are its siblings

and who are its cousins within the family. And then also there's the second band is, it says

selected by and it's who wants it. Some of them, we're just going to bottle without selected by

So it's like just single barrel Stellum, but most of them will be a selected by, or we'll give it a

name or a distributor will give it a name. We want to be able to name it in a way where you can say

like, I like this one. It was palletized with that one. I also like that one. Like I'm going to try this one because it's the same letter. We are designing the single barrel program with the

people that have made single barrel bourbon really the hottest part of the American whiskey

world right now in mind. So these labels, are they going to be able to go on the website and

find out like what exactly that is? Or is it just going to be kind of like, if you know, you know

there will be a lot of information on the website. We're still really getting a handle on like what

type of information and what type of giving it to people do we need to do. I think what is

tough for us with Stellum is it's really easy for us to default into what has become the easy way of

communicating for us, which is, you know what all the lingo means, here's all the lingo. Sure. And what we're trying to do with Stellum is to balance that with, you don't need to be

the person in your group of friends who's obsessed with whiskey to have this be your favorite brand

So we're still learning from a communication standpoint, where do we pick our shots about the intimidating details versus the let's tell you what's really important

To wrap up, what do you hope that people will take from this new brand

And I guess where do you see it going in the future? Because it's brand new

It just launched within the past couple months. I'm excited to see where the single barrel program takes it

But what do you hope for it? I think, first of all, there is a part of Barrelcraft Spirits where we're not going to let it get too far outside of our control without it being really good

I hope that we can keep up and we can have it be really big, really fast and really good

But if we have to keep it to the 13 states we're in, we're going to keep it to the 13 states we're in until we're ready to go into other places

I really hope that people understand what we're trying to do with the attitude of the brand

And we're not trying to say that this is a activist brand. What we are trying to say is like the age of bourbon being an American whiskey and then having a picture of what an American looks like is over. Anyone in the world who likes bourbon and anyone who thinks of themselves as an American, like this is an American whiskey for a evolved and like different thinking group of adults

You can see I don't stumble with my words that often. I have a shtick for sure

but I don't even know exactly how to communicate that feeling yet because it means so much to me personally

that I want everyone to love Barrel for being the best whiskey in the country

and I want everyone to love Stellum for being awesome and acknowledging the reality of what's going on

That would be my hopes and wishes for the brand. I have this pet project I'm working on right now

that I'm not telling a lot of people about, but if someone reaches out to me that has a connection to a bar

that wants to participate, all ears. We are finding somewhere between 12 and 36 picks

with people that we think are awesome around the country and asking them to let us hold back a case

And then we are making mixed packs of picks to find one bar in each major city

that wants to have one or two bottles of 30 people's different picks available at the bar

And we're only able to do it if we can plan it before we bottle it, because then we can hold it back

and we can like legally get it to everyone. But we've been wanting to do that with Barrel for a long time

but because of the way it's bottled, it's really hard to like, what's the starting point? And with Stellum, like we haven't started

bottling the single barrels yet. So like the starting point is right now. So hopefully in the next, I don't know

eight to 12 weeks, there will be four to 12 bars around the country

that have like a whole page of single barrel picks from Stellum. There's a couple of places in Los Angeles and San Diego

I can give you some clues on that have a big wissy culture. So I'm sure you're probably already aware of some of them

Yeah, no, and it's about like bars that are willing to have that and believe in the brand right away and also bars that are willing to do the inventory because it's a pain in the ass

And also bars that are open because we're still not quite open in Los Angeles. Yeah, I say that like everything's fine

It's going to take a while. But we also see like people are planning for the country reopening to some extent

Fingers crossed. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for talking about these spheres

I'm glad. Now, you said they're available in 13 states. Are they in California yet or no

They are in California. So right now, and I say 13, but I should count again because we made some changes

Arizona, Nevada, California, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Georgia, Maryland, Delaware, DC

It will be Kentucky and Illinois in the next month or two

Hopefully Arkansas too. That's very cool. I mean, that's a pretty nice, decent rollout

I mean, for being so new to this. So I'm excited. I think they're both solid products

I do recommend both of them. Absolutely. At the price point. I'm definitely looking forward

That's why I asked if they're in California, because I'm definitely going to buy bottles of both. Thank you

They're definitely ones I want to add to my bar cart. I think that's a cool story, too. I'm very happy to have you on talking about it

And thank you so much again for, you know, doing this interview and talking about it. Yeah

And also, if anyone who's not in one of those states is interested, if you go to StellumSpirits.com

we have a retail network that can get a bottle to pretty much anywhere, we think, now. So we'll be able to ship it for sure

Well, not us, but other people. All right. Well, cheers, Will. Thank you so much. Thank you so much

Yeah. So cheers, man. Cheers. so I hope you guys enjoyed that interview I am so excited about this whiskey it's such a cool

idea it's definitely something new to the industry but overall it's damn good whiskey I can't wait to

try the single barrel so let me know have you tried Stellum is it available in your area please

let me know especially if you've had a single barrel let me know how it is I can't wait to get my hands on one I will definitely pick up bottles of both of these and the single barrels to come

but until next time this has been bourbon bites whiskey reviews with the gaming twist

cheers and I'll see you guys next video Thank you