Why we need K3

Ever since we started canning Cold Smoke® Scotch Ale, we’ve had a problem keeping up with demand. I like to joke that we fail to plan for success. When we wrote our first business plan 21 years ago we set our sights high on quality and low on quantity. All we ever wanted was a job in Montana that would allow us to enjoy the world class recreational opportunities we have in this great state.  While our mission has never been to grow huge and take over the beer world, we have committed ourselves to “making it better” and continually improving quality. We take great joy in crafting world class beers for our friends and fellow Montanans to enjoy with our world class outdoor activities.

Since becoming Montana’s first modern brewery to package our beer in cans in 2006, we haven’t been able to keep up with the ever increasing demand. We thought “K2”,  our Northside expansion would take care of all our needs when completed in 2009.  Since we were capped by Montana’s 10k bbl limit law, we picked that facility because it was big enough to top out at 10k bbls of production.  We believed the “experts” who told us craft consumers wouldn’t go big for Montana made beer in a can. So we planned modestly. Now that we’ve found our sales potential to be higher than planned, we feel obligated to provide easier access to our beers for fellow Montanans in places like Great Falls, Billings, and parts unknown. See, we hear a lot about how people are filling up their trunks with Cold Smoke® to take to folks who can’t get it in their local markets.  So the timing is right for us to stretch beyond what we ever thought possible and expand to a first class production facility.

Our parents taught us that if you start something, do everything in your power to finish it. Building “K3” in Bonner is our attempt to at least get a start on finishing the “good problem” we created for ourselves by brewing a popular and award winning beer.

Thanks so much for the support over the last 20 years. We’re so very excited to begin sharing this journey with you and to see what happens in the next 20 on Cold Smoke Avenue.

Cheers!

Tim O’Leary and Suzy Rizza