Sultan, Washington’s Curtson Distillery turns bad beer into beautiful whiskey

Ask Robert Thompson about his spirits and distilling process, then step back and settle in. He’s got a lot to say.

Thompson, who owns Curtson Distillery in Sultan, Washington with his wife, Malinda Curtis, can talk distilling and spirits for hours. His do-it-yourself setup in an old gas station garage repair shop is a lesson in what can be done with human intuition, roll-up-your-sleeves hard work and an engineering mind.

“I like to experiment with new ways of doing things,” Thompson says.

Curtson Distillery is a play on the couple’s last names, Curtis and Thompson.

Thompson spends a lot of his time tinkering at the former gas station. His passion is creating spirits that are flavorful and smooth on the palate.

More than that, though, he loves to work on his distilling system, finding new ways to be more efficient and better ways to increase flavor in the aging process. The 100-gallon still Thompson purchased from Olympic Distilling now sits where customers once talked struts and brakes for nearly a century.

His shop has old pumps he’s repurposed into the engine of his cooling systems and computerized control systems that Thompson designed – patent pending — and dozens of barrels, both wood and metal. There are also huge plastic vats awaiting liquids, wood staves repurposed from old barrels he uses to imbue flavor into his spirits and even a mini race car he built for his grandson. That last one seems quite at home by the roll-up doors.

Thompson’s background in IT systems is evident everywhere you look.

His favorite part of the tour is a large industrial cabinet that looks like it once housed tools for making your Chevy road-worthy again. Now it’s home to Thompson’s experimental spirits. Small bottles with names like Devil’s Cut and Bad Batch. He breaks open a bottle of apple brandy and proffers it for tasting.

Even Curtson’s naming process isn’t ordinary. Instead of calling their spirits whiskey or bourbon, Thompson and Curtis decided to go with something else.

“I used to always ask Malinda for something brown when I wanted a whiskey, so we thought, what’s another name for brown,” Thompson says. “Malinda thought umber was cool.”

Curtson’s whiskeys are called “umbers” — Bold Rye Umber, Northwest Umber, Autumn Umber — after the dark brown pigment.

A few years ago, Thompson’s out-of-the-box thinking ran smack dab into a win-win opportunity. He heard about a brewery needing to get rid of a large amount of expired beer and remembered reading about a brewery in Belgium that turned bad beer into spirits.

“I thought, ‘What if?’” Thompson says.

Eight pallets of bad beer soon showed up at the distillery. Thompson had Sara Trocano, Curtson’s senior distillery associate, use a nail-puller to open 6,000 cans individually and dump them. He then ran it through his still, boiling it to 175°F to strip out the impurities, aged it 90 days in aging tanks on wooden staves and then bottled it as Bad Batch Umber.

“The breweries have to pay to get rid of it, so they’re excited when I call,” Thompson says. “Turning bad beer into beautiful whiskey.”

As with most things, though, Thompson wasn’t fine with letting things be. A believer in continual improvement, Thompson knew he couldn’t keep asking Trocano to open each can individually. Inspired by his log splitter, Thompson invented a crude machine that can slice and crush cases of beer cans like kindling in seconds.

The DIY machine uses a roughed up chop saw blade attached to the gears of an old water pump. Thompson then built out a plastic flume that guides the beer cans into the blade’s mouth, crushing and slicing them up in mere seconds and allowing the expired ale to pour out into a giant tub below.

Thompson, who has also used expired cider to make his apple brandy, now regularly receives shipments of pallets of expired beer to make his Bad Batch Umber.

After years of distilling on a small system in his Seattle apartment, Thompson convinced Curtis to take the leap and open a distillery. They opened Curtson Distillery a few months after the pandemic began in the fall of 2020.

It started out as a small operation, with their 100-gallon still and aging equipment jammed into 600 square feet of space in an old restaurant building along Main Street. A small outdoor patio allowed thirsty visitors to stop by for tastings.

“We did fairly well during the pandemic because we had the outdoor space and I think people just wanted to get out,” Curtis says.

In May of 2022, Thompson and Curtis purchased the old gas station to house the distillery. Until recently, they used the former production space as a tasting room to host spirit pairing events.

If you go:

Find Curtson Distillery at 30903 U.S. 2, Sultan, Wash., and online at curtson.com

Visit from noon to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday or call 719-287-4932 for more details.

3 to try

• Bad Batch Umber: Made from expired beer, this whiskey has a slight hoppy flavor mixed with a strong malted whiskey finish. Flavorful and smooth for a spirit clocking in at 110 proof.
• Blueberry Moonshine: This isn’t your grandfather’s moonshine. Made from 400 pounds of blueberries, this moonshine is extremely drinkable. Get the blueberry sachet and give it a blue hue and additional blueberry flavor after just a few days of steeping.
• Autumn Umber: Made from 50 percent fruit and 50 percent malted barley, this 96-proof spirit is finished on both French and American oak staves. It has a fruity single-malt flavor with dried fruit and barley to balance the heat.

This article is featured in the spring issue of Sound & Summit, a supplement of The Daily Herald.

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