Big News

Cold Smoke Scotch Ale Outage: Our tasting panel found an off flavor in some cans of Cold Smoke Scotch Ale in our Best By July 8, 2008 run. We consequently pulled 90 cases from local store shelves. Biological testing revealed no beer spoiling organisms present. Most people will not even notice this flavor variation. We regret that some cans may not meet our high standards. Please contact us at our Myrtle Street taproom if you have any further questions.

Remodel Update: Things are progressing on the Northside expansion. We have a big hole in the wall for our shipping and receiving door and a bunch of expensive steel making sure the bricks don't come a tumbling down. Fire suppression is part way in. We're still waiting for steel for our brewhouse and cellar floor. We're hoping to have the floor in within 8 weeks. Equipment is probably 80% complete and an inspection trip is planned in May. If things go smoothly we might be test brewing towards mid summer

The question on everyone's mind is: "When will you open?" The answer is "We don't know. It's a mystery." But it will open. Hopefully by fall. As with any remodeling situation, unforeseen stumbling blocks occur. For instance, nobody bothered to check that our proposed loading dock was designed to sit on top of an 8 inch high pressure gas line. Woops.

Other answers to FAQs: 1)No we will not close our Myrtle street brewery. We'll keep it going as a test brewery for experimental beers and old standbys until we lose our lease or can't afford to keep it. 2) There will be a taproom on the Northside that will serve ONLY the beers we produce there. Which means there will be two or three beers on tap: Cold Smoke Scotch Ale, Double Haul IPA, and Eddy Out Pale Ale. There will be more space there to hold special marketing events and fundraisers. The primary purpose of this expansion is that we need to meet the growing demand for our beer in bars, restaurants, and grocery stores.

We do have our building permit and Wayno has started work on the garage door. We moved our new boiler into the building on Wednesday and are now figuring out how to get this 3,000# monster into the basement. While we wait for steel to rebuild our brewery floor, JJ will be framing bathrooms and other walls. We had a request to include more toilets in the women's room so we're hoping to accommodate that.

Left picture shows Wayno and Jake prodding the boiler into 313 North 1st St W. Right picture: boiler on loading dock.

Once steel arrives construction of brewery floor will commence. We're hoping the equipment arrives the week after the floor cures (possibly end of May). Then we'll move tanks in and frame walls around brewhouse.

We are hoping to reuse and reduce our material needs whenever possible. We plan on purchasing one of the bowling lanes from Liberty Lanes deconstruction project and use for a bar top for our sample room.

Our building permit is bouncing from desk to desk at the building department. We made it through plan review from Health Department, zoning review from Office of Planning and Grants, and now we're wading through the engineering and plan review/inspection departments. A few things that slowed us down.

1) The city engineer thought there was one 4 inch sewer line servicing the building. A site review from our engineers had surmised two 4 inch lines existing and our plans were to add another 6 inch line. Since the new building codes call for a 6 inch line on all commercial buildings, the red flag went up. After a few discussions involving making sure the city had the location correct, it was decided that a fixture count with an official analysis from our mechanical engineer would give us a sewer line variance.

2) A special inspection plan is required of the metal floor structure we're erecting to support the weight of our beer tanks. It will also include inspecting the floor connections so our tanks don't fall over in the event of an earthquake. Funny thing is those tanks are sitting on four legs and the building's brick walls will crumble before those tanks fall over -BUT in fairness they could walk around a bit if things get really rocking. And our architect tells us if there's an earthquake in missoula it'll be a doozie. Soooo, the architects are drafting the inspection today.

So far we have a hole in the floor and a plan. A man a plan a canal, Panama. At least our equipment is ordered and shouldn't hold us up. Wish I could report more . . . -TO

Once again we are undertaking an expansion in order to keep up with the increased demand for Cold Smoke Scotch Ale and Double Haul IPA in cans and on draft. Our sales to local bars, restaurants, and stores has almost doubled in the last 18 months. The new facility will allow us to keep of with this demand and also enter new markets in Helena, Great Falls, Billings, and other Montana towns. If our construction budget allows, we will also be opening a taproom with very limited offerings in this new facility located right on top of Orange Street at 313 N 1st St West. This will allow us to have a fall back location should we lose our lease in our current facility that we lease. We hope to keep our existing tasting room open indefinitely but we need to prepare for the worst.

Plans are submitted to the Building, Health, and Zoning offices for permitting. Construction bids are starting to roll in. Licensing with State Liquor Division, Federal ATTB, and other government entities is underway. Equipment is on order with an expected delivery of March 2008. Some demolition has occurred. See pictures below. We hope to have a building permit within three weeks.

Expansion news: We're inching forward on planning and design. Mechanical plans and electrical plans are nearing completion.

Meanwhile the supply of Cold Smoke and our other beers has been hampered by a production glitch. This happened at a time of high demand so we've had to work extra brewshifts to recover in time to ship beer to opening ski areas. Hopefully if you can't find our beers in the can at your local grocer or c- store, you will still be able to find it at your local tavern. We should be caught up by the first of the year. If you have any questions about where to find our product or want to report local outages, give Tim a call at the brewery.

Short answer: Making progress but still getting plans. We hope to be actually doing some work over there sometime in November. We're currently waiting on, electrical, mechanical and plumbing plans that we'll need to get our building permit. I'll be sending a deposit check to the equipment manufacturers within the week.

I was asked why our prices are going up and if it's to help pay for our expansion. Here's my reply:

The short answer is we’re not raising our prices to pay for the expansion.The long? The increases are due to our increased costs to buy malt and hops. Our malt prices have doubled in the last 8 months. Hop prices for some varieties have quadrupled and the doom and gloom for 2009 will be worse for hops and likely not better for malt.

For malt the sitchew is: basically climate conditions have not been favorable for malt harvests. In 2006, excessive rains in Europe reduced exportable supplies of barley. A severe drought in Australia left the world supply short going into 2007 which saw strong demand. This year Europe lost much of their harvest due to excessive rains and Australia is still experiencing drought. North American supplies were already tight and now have increased demand. I know the guys in Montana didn’t fair too well with the dry year. Here’s an excerpt of one Sundurst MT farmer’s email to me from several weeks ago: Growers are getting “. . . a very fair price . . . as a shortage in almost every grain commodity for next year is making the markets react favorably ( for the producer that is). A little info on our barley specs. This year the area averaged 75 plump, 12.5 protein, 48 lbs. test weight. Our barley is generally better quality than that, but it was just too hot and dry in July this year. We averaged around 45 bushels per acre on our fallow ground, where we usually average around 65. Again, too hot and too dry.” (those proteins are on the high end of acceptable by the way)

I’ve also been told that Bush’s support for subsidizing ethanol has screwed with the prices for not only malt barley but any feed crop. So butter, milk, meat, beer – It’s all going up.

For hops the story is that for years growers haven’t been getting enough return on investment. Hop acreage has been decreasing yearly. There are rumors that Bud bought up a bunch of Cascades which really sucks for those of us making IPAs and American Pale Ales. We may have to change our formulation for Eddy Out Pale Ale and very possibly Double Haul IPA. It is a reality that some brewers WILL NOT get the hops they need in the coming months.

My take is that historically low prices (and inventories) are now being corrected due to unfavorable climate conditions resulting in low yield harvests. Ethanol subsidies are making it attractive to grow corn and soy at the expense of hops and barley. Increased demand for hoppier craft beers is putting pressure on already dwindling supplies. All of this adds up to a perfect storm for beer price increases.

We bought Hallertau in March for $5.55 per pound- they’re now being quoted at over $16 per pound. It seems to be literally going up daily.

If we did not raise prices we’d be looking at swallowing close to $75k in cost of goods increases. Even a quarter per pint increase though still does not bring us close to “Big City” craft prices. Buy a pint in Seattle or Denver and you’re looking at $5 plus on the plank. In Missoula you can get our beer for $3.25 to $3.75 per pint.

Expect to see some beers having to be reformulated at the best and not available at the worst. Our beers may end up tasting subtly different as we switch bittering hops. We are searching for a suitable and available replacement for Cascades to use in Eddy Out Pale Ale. The most noticeable change will be if we have to replace our flavor and aroma hops – or decrease our hopping altogether.

So hopefully we can all ride this out. I’ll try to keep you posted. -Tim O

The expansion is still in the planning stages. We're finalizing our floor layout and drafting, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing plans and hope to have the permit application in by the end of this month. Our target opening date for the production part of our expansion is Mid April 2008. A limited offering taproom should open shortly thereafter.

We're working on getting more cans out in the market but demand for draft and cans continues to climb. Work has not begun on the northside but the partying has! Progress will hopefully be documented here so stay tuned.

Update: Got the chiller chillen and we be up to production capacity. Still not able to keep up with the demand this hot summer has created. Working on our new site but can "brown outs" may occur in Missoula. We really are busting our cahones trying to get more cans on the shelf. Thanks for your patience.

We are in the midst of a heat wave that will slow our can production rate for the next week. The 107 degree record last Friday put so much strain on our beer tank chiller that it could not keep the beer cold enough to can. When it's too warm the beer foams too much and spillage increases. We are expecting a replacement chiller by the end of the week and full production should resume then. Currently we are operating at about 1/3 of our canning capacity.

In the meantime, we are knocking ourselves out trying to replenish the empty store shelves in Missoula. Tentatively we'll be canning Cold Smoke Tuesday and IPA hopefully Thursday. We are sorry for the delay and are grateful for our customers' patience. Singles of IPA have been spotted at the Holiday on Russell, and some of the privately owned c-stores.