Tamarack Brewing, Lakeside 

Josh Townsley, owner of Tamarack Brewing Co. in Lakeside, has tried to create more than a place for beer lovers.

“Our mission statement is to create high-quality beer and food in a community-based atmosphere,” he said. “We wanted to get the feeling of a gathering place for people from all walks of life.”

Townsley and his family came to the Flathead Valley to start Tamarack when they were looking to move out of Arizona. Townsley had been part of the state’s largest brewing company, Four Peaks Brewery in Tempe.

He opened Tamarack as a full-service restaurant and brewery in July  2007. The establishment has 12 beers on tap, with eight staples and four seasonal brews.

“We try to keep things new and exciting and fresh,” he said of the rotating stock of beers.

Tamarack offers numerous community-friendly options, with trivia night on Tuesdays and a charity tap night on Wednesdys, when 75 cents from each pint sold is donated to a local charity.

Tamarack also has extended its reach to Missoula, opening a restaurant there, which also has 12 Tamarack beers on tap, in April 2011.

Tamarack’s flagship brew is the Yard Sale amber ale, which Townsley said can be found on tap throughout the valley.

He said that people generally start out on the lighter side in their first introduction to craft beer.

“People will try a blonde ale, it’s crisp and clean, and much more full-bodied than what they’re used to with mass-produced beer,” he said. “Then they try an amber and darker, then branch out and grow, the same way I fell in love with beer. You become more of a connoisseur.”

Flathead Lake Brewing, Bigfork

Flathead Lake Brewing Co. manager Sandy Clare attributes the recent escalation of the brewery’s beer sales to “a perfect storm” of circumstances.

First, she said, the beers produced by head brewer Tim Jacoby have generated and maintained a public following in the eight years since the business has opened in its current site in Woods Bay, 5 miles south of Bigfork.

Then she believes that publicity work by marketing director Blake Nicolazzo has attracted a great deal of recent attention.

“We’ve cleaned up our logo and renamed our beers, reintroduced our look,” she said. “It’s very new and different and our artwork is really bold and fresh.

“We’ve always had great beer and combine that with neat branding, and then we have a great sales director [Nate Willete] out pounding the streets.”

In about a year, Flathead Lake Brewing Co. expects to move to accommodate the extreme growth into the old home of the North Shore Lanes bowling alley in Bigfork.

The building will be split into a restaurant on one side and the production facility on the other. It’s a time-consuming project, in part because Flathead Lake Brewing Co. is going to be housed in a certified Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green building project.

“We’re doing everything as environmentally friendly as possible,” Clare said. “We’ll be the second LEED brewery in the U.S. Hopefully we’ll be leading the way with innovative design that’s exciting. It’s taking some time because we have to do everything very specifically.”

Flathead Lake Brewing Co.’s most popular beers are the Centennial IPA and Two Rivers Pale Ale. The brewery makes around a dozen types of beer, from the light Wild Mile Wheat to the very dark 369 Stout.

“We think Flathead people and Montanans are hearing about our beer and demanding it,” Clare said.

Glacier Brewing, Polson  

Glacier Brewing Co. owner Dave Ayers had years of experience at microbreweries in Colorado before opening his place in Polson 10 years ago.

 He had dreamed of opening a brewery in Montana for years, starting with an epiphany during a drive from Fort Collins, Colo., to visit his girlfriend, who was working as a naturalist in Glacier National Park.

It was many years later, when he had married the girlfriend and had children and was working as the head brewer of a pub in Telluride, Colo., that he actually took the leap along with his wife and brother-in-law.  

He found a used brewing system in California on the Internet, took it down there and installed it at the Polson site, which was an old racquetball facility at the time Glacier Brewing moved in.

That original brewing system is still in use.

“In the summer it’s working so hard that it becomes red hot,” he said. “It would be nice to have a bigger system in the summer. In the winter, we would like bigger demand.”

Ayers said Glacier Brewing calls itself a German alehouse, brewing all of its beers using the ale technique. The lagers and hybrids also are brewed in the manner of ales, “so we have a quicker turnaround time in the tanks,” he said.

“That’s absolutely necessary in the summer. Once a tank is packaged, it’s sold.”

Glacier Brewing has a good-sized tasting room, the Tap Room, with seats for around 100 people, and another 120 seats in the outdoor beer garden. Glacier Brewing at one time had the biggest tasting room in Montana, but with the growth of the industry, it has lost that distinction, Ayers said.

“I like it when people ask how business is going,” he said. “I tell them we are open 12 months a year, and for a small Montana retail and manufacturing business, it’s a neat trick if you can do that.”

Desert Mountain Brewing, Columbia Falls

Though Desert Mountain Brewing will be the smallest brewery in the valley when it opens, the selection will be anything but.

“Because we’re so small, we’re planning to do a lot of experimentation and brew a number of beers that are unique,” owner Kelley Christensen said. “We want people to come to our brewery and try something different they can’t get anywhere else.”

As well as brewing the standard beers — an India Pale Ale, stout, porter, amber and wheat — in their four-barrel system, Christensen and her husband, Shawn, plan to do some experimenting. They hope to make a heather beer (heather makes the beer purple), as well as fruit flavors such as cherry, huckleberry, pumpkin and apricot. They will also make a root beer for the younger clients of the tasting room.

“We want Desert Mountain Brewing to be somewhere people can bring children,” Christensen said. “We want it to be a family friendly establishment, not just a bar.”

The Christensens decided a brewery and tasting room would be a good way to keep themselves employed doing something they love.  

A December opening is planned, though Christensen said at this point that date is a “moving target.” The business, which will have room for 20 to 25 customers in its tasting area, will be located next to Three Forks Grille on Nucleus Avenue. It is in the construction process.

“The reason we chose our location is we’re right off of Highway 2 and you can see us,” she said. “We want to be somewhere tourists come and have a good time, and at the same time, we understand the strength of any business depends on the local base.”

Christensen said Desert Mountain will be a community-oriented business, offering game nights, knitting nights and benefit brews.

Great Northern Brewing, Whitefish

The Great Northern Brewing Co. has stood out above the Whitefish city skyline since 1995.

The three glass-walled stories were designed for a unique architectural look, but also to house the brewery’s distinct gravity-flow brewing system.

“It’s a little old school and traditional,” according to Jessica Rucey, retail marketing manager at Great Northern.

The beer-making process starts after a bucket elevator on the ground floor carries the malt to a mill on the third story; it’s all downhill from there.

Tours are available for those who would like to see how Great Northern creates its popular Wheatfish and Going To The Sun IPA beers, among many others. (Head brewer Joe Barberis said the Good Medicine Imperial Spring Ale is also becoming a local favorite.)

The brewery has 11 beers on tap; Barberis said he creates 18 to 20 beers throughout the year. Black Star Draught House serves Great Northern beer, wine and food on the second level of the building.

Rucey said one of the biggest customer contingents is made up of the 75 or so people who are part of the “Great Stein Club.”

“People drink 50 steins, and they become part of the club and get a stein on the ceiling,” she said.

“They’re the heart and soul of the brewery.”

Great Northern is excited to have Pete Thomas, design director with the ZaneRay Group in Whitefish, designing new logos. Packages with the new Wheatfish logo were distributed in early September and more Great Northern packaging projects in collaboration with ZaneRay will be rolled out in the future.

“You’d like to think the product stands for itself, but it looks really slick when people make a decision to try a beer,” she said of the Wheatfish logos.

The brewery only distributes to Western Montana right now, sending kegs to bars in Missoula and Bozeman, and bottles to grocery stores and “quirky” convenience stores, Rucey said, with a lot of recent growth in the Helena area.

“We want to grow smartly and not too fast,” Rucey said.

The Double Tap, Whitefish

State Sen. Ryan Zinke, R-Whitefish, has no personal beer brewing experience, but he has a history with the people who do.

In his work with the Montana Legislature, he was a loyal advocate for the Montana Brewers Association. So he decided, upon leaving the Legislature, to join the state’s growing craft beer scene himself.

“I enjoyed the people and the industry,” he said. “They’re all hardworking and fun-loving, and they’re very serious about their beer.”

Zinke is currently going through the planning process to open The Double Tap, a tasting room and microbrewery on the western edge of Whitefish at 336 Second Ave. The new facility, planned to be about 2,000 square feet, is modeled on a Great Northern Railway grainery.

He wants his opening to coincide with the completion of road work on nearby stretches of U.S. 93, so he expects it will be about a year until The Double Tap serves its first customers.

A Pilsner, an India Pale Ale and a seasonal beer are foremost in Zinke’s brewing plans. He expects to be delivering kegs to local pubs, as well as serving his craft beers through two taps in his tasting room and on the patio.

“It excites me to be delivering a handcrafted ale,” he said. “To be a brewmaster is almost like being part of an old guild. It’s something locally made, produced with local Montana products. It’s a great way to employ local people and it’s a clean industry.”

Part of the attraction for Zinke is that his business add value to an area of Whitefish he feels deserves to be spruced up. His family has owned the property where The Double Tap will be located for 75 years.

“I was thinking of what little industries will work in Whitefish that will help certain neighborhoods that have seen better times,” he said.