PHILOSOPHY
German precision meets eco-minded. Head Brewer and Director of Operations Justin Moore explains that while the range of beers is somewhat traditional, there’s something for everybody. “We do have the IPAs and double IPAs that we get to have fun with as well,” he assures. What’s more, the methods of making Red Lodge’s brews are anything but traditional. “We have Montana’s largest solar array,” explains Moore. Among other innovations: a “free air” system which utilizes sensors and the outside air to keep beer fresh inside up to nine months a year, and an in-house biodiesel operation (to run company vehicles and delivery trucks). The brewers also crowd-source some of their own ingredients: locals are invited to bring in their own home-grown hops for use in a special fall brew called Harvest, which those same growers later enjoy at a discount.
KEY BEER
Bent Nail IPA, a juicy, piney brew at around 6.3% ABV is the biggest seller these days, but the original altbier, called Glacier Ale and pleasantly quaffable at 5% ABV, gives a look at what Red Lodge was built on. “I think it most represents us, our best year-round beer that is true to style,” says Moore. Also try the 5% ABV kölsch, known as Reserve Ale, cleanly brewed and made for sessions in the grassy beer garden out back.
Bozeman
MADISON RIVER BREWING CO.
20900 Frontage Rd., Bldg. B Belgrade, MT 59714 • (406) 388-0322 • madisonriverbrewing.com • Established: 2005
SCENE & STORY
Located a stone’s throw from Belgrade’s Gallatin Field Airport, which serves the Bozeman area, this unassuming taproom is the ideal place to unwind with locals before a flight (or after a bumpy arrival). While the warehouse exterior isn’t much to look at, the interior is inviting and busy. Drinkers chat quietly at tall tables and a small wooden bar beneath the tall ceilings. There’s classic rock on the stereo, and a wall of ultracolorful hand-blown glass tankards belonging to the Mug Club members. It’s for locals, but they’re an amiable lot. “We get all kinds of people here,” says owner Howard McMurray, the tall, gentle fellow behind the brew kettles. “We get fly fisherman, we get college students. A few days ago a little old lady came here from Butte for our Double IPA (which is a 9% ABV beer) and I actually questioned her—are you sure you want this one? And she said she’d driven an hour and a half just to drink it. It’s great to see that.”
PHILOSOPHY
There are six standard taps and two seasonals at any given time, and McMurray employs a workmanlike approach, researching styles and the ingredients generally used in each, to just “go with it.” It’s refreshing to hear a brewer speak of his own beers in this unpretentious way.
KEY BEER
Copper John Scotch Ale is a style known as Wee Heavy (akin to a strong porter), and McMurray’s version is made with roasted barley and a bit of smoked malts, which gives it an appealing char kick. In 2015, this beer took a gold for Scottish-Style Ales, besting fifty-one other entries.
BOZEMAN BREWING CO.
504 N. Broadway • Bozeman, MT 59715 (406) 585-9142 • bozemanbrewing.com • Established: 2001
SCENE & STORY
Ask anyone where to drink craft beer in Bozeman and the response is, inevitably, “Dude. The BoZone.” The nickname, admittedly, has a catchy ring. Nestled in a former pea canning factory in Bozeman’s northeast-of-center “warehouse district”—really just a line of buildings a few blocks off the main street—it’s packed every night with locals clutching pints or goblets poured off of one of the eight taps. Mondays bring bluegrass jams, and the clubhouse feel lends an added buzz. This seems like the place Bozeman’s most dedicated beer drinkers and ski bums come together when it snows outside, and with charming servers and walls that were literally painted with a sort of brewer’s grain-infused paint, it’s easy to see why. Bottle art was derived from a variety of historic Montana breweries, and overall the place has an unpretentious, friendly feel.
PHILOSOPHY
“When I started out here, it was on a shoestring—borrowing against my house and the whole nine yards,” recalls founder and head brewer Todd Scott, who brewed for the well-known (but ill-fated) Spanish Peaks brand, and scored much of its equipment after it closed. “And I was having a kid at the same time. I needed to come up with a beer that was going to start out selling well right out of the gate. I didn’t have time to build a reputation for brewing awesome IPAs, or something like that. I needed a beer that was easy drinking, that people could drink three, four, five of, that was popular at the time—like Fat Tire. The idea was to brew something that looked like a Fat Tire, but didn’t have that biscuity flavor. And that was our Amber.”
KEY BEER
The malt-forward Bozone Amber Select is Scott’s flagship today, and they’ve recently started canning several other beers like Plum Street Porter (six malts; no fruit added). Look for the sour Belgian tripel-style creation called Funky Virtue; at 11% ABV, it is aged with cherries in port wine barrels for three years. It’s got all the sourness and power and oaky notes one expects of well-made American wild ale.
MONTANA ALEWORKS
611 E. Main St. • Bozeman, MT 59715 (406) 587-7700 • montanaaleworks.com • Established: 2000
SCENE & STORY
Spread out spaciously beneath the rafters of an 8,000-square-foot former train depot in the heart of town, Aleworks is packed nightly with locals, and its pool tables, cement bar, and outdoor patio accommodate crowds of around 300 at any given time. Still, with its cavernous wood ceilings and long layout, it doesn’t feel like a mad-house even on a very busy night. The pepper-Parmesan fries have a well-deserved reputation, and the fare centers around burgers and other steakhouse specialties like bison, Wild Alaskan salmon, and a superb eight-ounce tenderloin steak.
PHILOSOPHY
Upscale but not uptight. “We’re not fine dining by any means, but we do a lot of really nice food, and one of the big things for me is keeping it affordable for locals—for everybody,” says managing partner Roth Jordan. “We’re really preaching that we take as much pride in a nine-dollar hamburger as we do in a thirty-six-dollar Kobe rib-eye steak.”
KEY BEER
There are thirty-two mostly local taps and eight rotating guest taps weighted toward regional brews from Belgrade, Missoula, and Big Sky. There’s always a cask-conditioned beer (recently, Madison River Oatmeal Stout) and several seasonals like Bozeman Brewing Company’s piney Harvestfest märzen.
Butte
QUARRY BREWING CO.
124 W. Broadway St. • Butte, MT 59701 (406) 723-0245 • wedigbeer.com • Established: 2007
SCENE & STORY
Chuck Schnabel and his wife, Lyza, opened a little (seven-barrel system) brewery in Butte against what some would call considerable odds. Butte was once home to five breweries at the turn of the last century (when “the Richest Hill on Earth” had made it a fantastically rich mining metropolis), but none survived past the mid-1960s, and the rough-around-the-edges town wasn’t the place to try anything newfangled.
But today the Schnabels’ taproom is a kind of testament to the steady community-building power of craft beer. It’s in the old Grand Hotel, which was built in 1915 but gutted by fire in 1992 and vacant ever since. Plans for a ten-room bed and breakfast would make it Butte’s first brewery B&B in the modern era. Chuck or Lyza can usually be found tending bar, and it’s a good stopping point between Bozeman and Helena. Quarry’s beers are named for types of local rock (basalt, granite, mica, calcite, etc.); Chuck experiments with new recipes to meet the rising expectations and changing palates of beer lovers.
PHILOSOPHY
Chuck Schnabel is a pragmatist, even a bit curmudgeonly, and his beers reflect a utilitarian approach. “I try to keep it simple,” he says. “There’s no sense in overcomplicating recipes, overcomplicating brews. I don’t even send beers to competitions. I don’t believe in them. My biggest thing is this: If the beer sells, it’s good. We gotta be doing something right.” True enough. He risked a lot to get a craft brewery going in a ma
crobrew tavern town, and seven years in, business is booming.
KEY BEER
Schnabel is particularly proud of his Gneiss IPA (6.8% ABV), made with Chinook and Cascade hops.
A Wild Rider’s Party Town
Robert Craig Knievel, a.k.a. Evel Knievel, was born and raised in Butte (Oct. 17, 1938 to Nov. 30, 2007). Evel Knievel Days, a festival in his honor, occurs the last weekend in July, drawing some 50,000 every year. As the story goes, eight-year-old Knievel attended a daredevil show in town, and the rest is history—thirty-five broken bones later. On St. Patrick’s Day, Butte, which has no open container law, becomes a massive open-air street party, and Quarry sells a great deal of beer every single second of it.
Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley
Southwestern Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, a 100-mile stretch from Missoula in the north down to Lost Trail Pass (7,014 feet), straddling the Bitterroot River and flanked by the Bitterroot and Sapphire ranges, is not to be missed. With its world-class fishing holes and kayaking streams, jagged mountain vistas, easily accessible hot springs, swaths of cottonwood forest, historical attractions (Lewis and Clark paused in the area, and the Daly Mansion—a 24,000-square-foot, fifty-room palace—draws many visitors), it’s one of Montana’s prettiest corners. Missoula is home to a vibrant literary tradition (Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, was from here, and the yearly Festival of the Book is a major draw) and has a growing beer scene, nourished by the University of Montana, and features the Garden City Brewfest held every year on the first Saturday in May.
BITTER ROOT BREWING CO.
101 Marcus St. • Hamilton, MT 59840 (406) 363-7468 • bitterrootbrewing.com • Established: 1998
SCENE & STORY
In what used to be an old apple warehouse, this brewery in the sleepy former copper mining capital of Hamilton is bright and cheerful, with high wooden tables and metal stools—something of a Montana brewpub standard—and interesting old historical artifacts and photos, chalkboards, even a few big peacock feathers for good measure. Owner Tim Bozik, a commercial furniture manufacturer who moved to the area fifteen years ago, saw a wide-open opportunity to serve a thirsty local clientele who had few local options for craft beer. He utilized old dairy tanks and other hand-built equipment and began winning over the locals, crank by crank. “Old timers would come by and ask me, ‘Are you gonna be brewing that dark sh—t?’ Yep, I said. And most of those guys are still regulars.” Bozik and his daughter, Nicol, are big music fans as well. There’s a stage in the corner for live music twice a week; Huey Lewis (of ’80s rock band fame) lives nearby, so if you’re lucky you’ll catch one of his impromptu appearances.
“There’s such an eclectic crowd that comes in,” says Bozik. “Walk in at any given time and you’re bound to see the local pig farmer sitting next to the town judge and maybe a highway patrol guy.”
PHILOSOPHY
“We’re strictly about quality. I don’t want someone coming in here and ordering a porter or IPA and hearing them say, ‘You missed it,’” says Bozik. In other words, the brewing ethos is more or less directly to style, with an emphasis on clean, balanced beers. With the “whims,” or seasonals, and experiments though, expect to see some more innovative styles like India Black Ale, smoked beers, and other departures. “The whims allow our brewers to try new things, try something that excites them. Sometimes we have guest brewers. And we do the same thing with our kitchen,” says Nicol Bozik.
KEY BEER
The juicy 6.2% ABV IPA is the flagship, but look for what’s on the seasonal and whim list for a taste of what the brewery can really do. Additionally, the 5.1% ABV porter is especially interesting for its use of smoked malt, which gives it an almost leathery, earthy bite.
BIG SKY BREWING CO.
5417 Trumpeter Way • Missoula, MT 59808 • (406) 549-2777 • bigskybrew.com • Established: 1995
SCENE & STORY
Two good friends who spent all their spare time home brewing and visiting breweries moved to Missoula in 1990 and met a third friend who was working in a ski shop. The trio got serious about beer (when not backcountry skiing) and their by-the-bootstraps creation, Big Sky, has grown so rapidly that today it likely brews more beer in one facility than the rest of Montana’s combined. Not bad for “a bunch of yahoos up here having a good time,” says cofounder Bjorn Nabozney. To certain Montanans who rue progress, the sudden success and size, can seem off-putting, but it’s hard to begrudge their good-natured success. “We’ve sort of become the Schmidt Brewery of the craft scene with all of our animals,” says Nabozney, whose mother designs the cartoonlike label art for the brewery. A visit to the bright, modern taproom is a fun affair, because every visitor is allowed four samples, which are no mere sips. Despite the location in an industrial park, there’s often a sizeable crowd on hand. And check out the summer concert series, which brings major acts to Missoula (like Wilco, a couple of years ago) for outdoor performances that are surprisingly intimate.
PHILOSOPHY
Ultimately, Big Sky is in it for the beer. “We don’t brew to get medals,” says Nobozney. “We brew for ourselves. We brew what we like. Which is very similar to a lot of craft brewers. We don’t brew a West Coast–style beer; we don’t brew an East Coast–style beer. We’re kind of monkeys-in-the-middle with regard to our hops and our malt characters. Our alcohols are pretty manageable; we don’t brew a bunch of extreme beers. When I’m having a beer, I want to enjoy my third beer and not feel like I’m overly full or like I can’t have another one. After I’m done skiing or getting off the river, I want to be able to have a couple.”
That approach has paid off. “We know that because of our size, we’re not the local beer anymore, we’re more like Montana’s beer. We’re an apple in a basket of oranges—distinctly different,” he says.
KEY BEER
The success of Big Sky has been built largely on the huge sales of Moose Drool, a slightly sweet-tasting 5.3% ABV American Brown Ale made with a tangy touch of Willamette hops from the Pacific Northwest, but the brewery’s more ambitious barrel-aged barley wines, Belgian-style saisons, and other limited releases are worth trying, too.
Local Hero
Brennan’s Wave: Missoula and the Bitterroot area are famous for whitewater rafting, kayaking, and river boarding. In the taprooms and bars of Missoula, you’ll inevitably hear of this man-made whitewater kayaking destination downtown on the Clark Fork River at Caras Park. Local Brennan Guth was a star high school athlete who later discovered whitewater and created a Montana-based kayaking school. He died in a boating accident in Chile in 2001, and a major community effort, including donations from Big Sky Brewing Co., resulted in the construction of this $300,000 play spot in the river (for experienced paddlers only), which has been the site of the U.S. Freestyle Kayaking Championships. It’s a meaningful local landmark.
BAYERN BREWING
1507 Montana St. • Missoula, MT 59801-1409 • (406) 721-1482 • bayernbrewery.com • Established: 1987
SCENE & STORY
Think: Little Bavaria. Owner and head brewer Jürgen Knöller, who bought the operation from its original owners in 1991, is a born-and-raised Bavarian brewmaster, and he has taken great pains to create the atmosphere of a traditional German bierstube here, with wooden tables, German breweriana, hop garlands, and a barrel on the bar. The space is clean, with a wide bar and plenty of tables and stools inside. There are some traditional snacks available, like German Landjaegers (Bavarian beef jerky), and on Fridays, during the warm months, brats and sauerkraut are served outside. It’s popular with firefighters in very dry years, reports Knöller, and there’s a strong local contingent of fans as well. And like many German breweries back in the fatherland, Bayern is now working with a recycle/reuse program for their bottles.
PHILOSOPHY
“We’re a lot different than the other breweries. For one, it’s the good old way of brewing German beer, following the Reinheitsgebot [the German Beer Purity Law of 1516],” says
Jürgen. Reinheitsgebot, still followed in spirit if not to the letter of the law in southern Germany, means the only ingredients used are malt, hops, yeast, and water, with nothing else in the brew. What’s more, he’s super dedicated to traditional styles like pilsner and Dopplebock while adhering to extremely tight protocols for making and serving beer, but he’s equally as vigorous in the fun department, sponsoring a raucous Oktoberfest and other events.
KEY BEER
Bayern Pilsner, at 5% ABV, is exactly true to style, and has a bready taste with good, ample, noble hop flavor, which is on the spicy side.
KETTLEHOUSE MYRTLE ST.
602 Myrtle St. • Missoula, MT 59801 • (406) 728-1660, ext. 201 • Established: 2009
KETTLEHOUSE NORTH SIDE
313 N. 1st St. W. • Missoula, MT 59802 • (406) 728-1660, ext. 222 • Established: 1995
SCENE & STORY
The original location of Kettlehouse, a brew-on-premises facility where customers could make their own beer in small batches, has a gritty, backcountry ski hut feel, and newcomers are likely to find the crowd at least two-deep around the bar. It’s there you’ll find the magnificently named Al Pils—bartender, in-house philosopher, and the bearded inspiration behind a house beer bearing his own name. Pils and his cohorts serve an ultradedicated fan base that sometimes refer to their favorite establishment as the “K-Hole,” mingling as they sip on taproom-only offerings like the kookily named (but seriously brewed) Fresh Bongwater Pale Ale, Hemptober Spliff, and Discombobulator Maibock.
The newer north side location, necessitated by the company’s steady growth, is a sleeker affair straddling the Orange Street underpass and built in an old train building, with high ceilings, exposed brick walls, and a wooden bar that must be one of the longest in Montana. It’s a slightly more serene atmosphere, but not stuffy by any stretch of the imagination.
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