If you’ve been to a taproom, you know that at most breweries across the state there’s a three pint limit and they stop serving at 8 p.m. One listener wants to know why. We've got answers. Pull up a stool, crack open a local brew and settle in for a taproom tale – or some barroom banter, depending on the time of day.
Austin Amestoy: Welcome to the Big Why, a series from Montana Public Radio where we find out what we can discover together. I’m your host, Austin Amestoy. This is a show about listener-powered reporting. We’ll answer your questions — large or small — about anything under the Big Sky. By Montanans for Montana, this is The Big Why.
Austin Amestoy: Reporter Shaylee Ragar is here today. Hey, Shaylee!
Shaylee Ragar: Hi, Austin!
Austin Amestoy: I understand you’re hopped up to answer our question today?
Shaylee Ragar: Yeah, Austin, I’ve cracked open a good one! And I think our listeners are going to be buzzing with the answer. OK, last pun, I promise. We're talking about beeraucracy today!
Austin Amestoy: Ahh the bureaucracy of beer, right? What do we need to know?
Shaylee Ragar: Yes. We received a question about how Montana breweries are regulated. If you’ve been to a taproom, you know that at most breweries across the state there’s a three pint limit and they stop serving at 8 p.m. Our listener wanted to know: Why is that?
Austin Amestoy: Sounds great! Where can one learn about the history of brewing in Montana?
Shaylee Ragar: Well, I talked to several people for this story and they all pointed me to the same man.
While standing in his private brewery museum in Polson, Steve Lozar sang me a commercial jingle from the 1950s. He remembers harmonizing to it with his family during road trips. Lozar is a one-man encyclopedia about Montana brewing history. His memorabilia and artifacts date back to the 1800s and cover every inch of wall and ceiling space.
Steve Lozar: Well, I started picking up stuff because I love the unique designs and the colors and how they all go together. How they meant something to the community.
Austin Amestoy: Sounds like an incredible space. How did Lozar become a brewery historian?
Shaylee Ragar: Well, he’s a renaissance man of sorts. He’s a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. And he’s an artist and owned a screen printing business. He’s also an anthropologist and a longtime board trustee for the Montana Historical Society.
Lozar’s interest in beer is rooted in his family. His great-grandfather was a saloon owner with close ties to Kessler Brewing in the late 1800s.
He also remembers when alcohol was federally outlawed on reservations until 1953. His dad and uncles would drink beer together in a bunker under their house.
Steve Lozar: And I thought it was so cool. And it smelled, well it smelled like a brewery.
Austin Amestoy: So it was a personal passion! What are some important points in brewing history Lozar says we should know about?
Shaylee Ragar: Montana’s first official brewery opened in 1863 in Virginia City – Gilbert Brewing. So brewing beer goes back a ways here. Other breweries across the state soon followed.
The industry continued to grow through the turn of the century, and brewers here were national players. Lozar showed me a bottle of Pabst beer from the late 1800s, which was brewed in Milwaukee, but on the label –
Steve Lozar: So you’ll see here, where does this bottle come from?
Shaylee Ragar: Troy, Montana
Steve Lozar: Troy, Montana, yeah.
Shaylee Ragar: And then, of course Prohibition from 1920 to 1933 brought it all to a screeching halt.
Austin Amestoy: I was wondering when that would come into play. A total ban on producing, distributing and consuming alcohol is certainly relevant. So the official brewing industry was finished?
Shaylee Ragar: Right. “Official” being the operative word there. We’ll have to do another episode on bootlegging in Montana. The important thing to know is that when prohibition came to an end, the state took a very restrictive and careful approach to regulating this newly legal, sometimes dangerous substance that just about everybody wanted to get their hands on.
Austin Amestoy: Let’s get into it. Tell me the nitty gritty about how the state regulated booze.
Shaylee Ragar: So it’s a three-tier system with licenses for production, distribution and retail. You can only hold one type of license at a time. And in the 1940s, the state decided to put a cap on the number of liquor licenses for every town in Montana based on population size. The licenses could be sold on the open market, and existing license holders were grandfathered in. So anybody with a bar or tavern already? They were good to go.
The quota system is central to answering our question: Why are breweries limited in ounces and hours.
Austin Amestoy: I think I’m starting to see where this is going, Shaylee. Break it down for us.
Shaylee Ragar: Here is where some basic economics comes in. The quota system creates an artificially limited resource. That lack of supply means the value of each individual license went through the roof. Lawmakers said they wanted to limit alcohol consumption. Lozar says existing taverns and large producers also wanted to limit competition, so they supported the quota system. It was a high barrier to entry.
Steve Lozar: If you’re out to make money, then you’re going to favor anything that’s going to enhance that opportunity for you. So I think at the bottom, at the root of it all, there’s no question in my mind, that’s what it is.
Austin Amestoy: Ok so where do breweries fit in during this period in the mid-1900s?
Shaylee Ragar: In a nutshell, large, national distributors like Budweiser monopolized the market for decades post-prohibition.
So let’s fast-forward to the '80s and '90s when microbreweries begin to crop up again in Montana, like Big Sky Brewing Company in Missoula. They brewed their first batch in 1995 and they’re now the state’s largest producer and distributor of beer.
Bjorn Nabozney: Moose Drool is our first market success, which is really nice because in our rotation it’s still our number one beer overall.
Shaylee Ragar: That’s Bjorn Nabozney, one of the founders of Big Sky. I met him out at the brewery’s taproom. He says from a regulatory perspective, those early days were like building an airplane while flying.
Bjorn Nabozney: At the state level, they didn’t know how to treat breweries. There was only a couple and so their experience was really limited, so the rules had not really been written for Montana and breweries other than what had came out of post-prohibition.
Austin Amestoy: So there were the very beginnings of another brewery boom and the state had to figure out what to do about it.
Shaylee Ragar: Right. And remember that three-tier system? Breweries were producers. They were allowed to offer free samples and sell growlers onsite. But they couldn’t actually serve beer.
Austin Amestoy: Oh wow, when did that change?
Shaylee Ragar: In 1999. That’s when the Montana Legislature passed a law permitting small breweries to serve 48 ounces of beer per customer per day from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Austin Amestoy: Aha! This is the law our listener had a question about.
Shaylee Ragar: Exactly. And this is the rub: Brewers didn’t have to buy those expensive, limited liquor licenses. So tavern owners suddenly had a new competitor who didn’t have to buy-in to the same system. Nabozney says tension was inevitable.
Bjorn Nabozney: All of a sudden we had an adversarial relationship with, say, the Montana Tavern Owners Association and the distributors, and we had to figure all of that stuff out. Which we still haven’t. Here we are, in my experience, 31 years later and we’re still kind of fighting like cats and dogs.
Shaylee Ragar: That fighting continued because brewers have been pushing to expand that hour and ounce limit since 1999. After all, brewery owners saw customers leaving at 8 pm and drinking their same beer next door, just because they couldn’t stay open later or offer more beer.
Austin Amestoy: Interesting, so the law pitted breweries against bars. And we’re back to the state’s liquor license system. Why were brewers pushing for expansion? They could just remain suppliers?
Shaylee Ragar: They could, and some do. But these are businesses trying to turn a profit. And Matt Leow with the Montana Brewers Association says serving your own beer onsite is essential.
Matt Leow: In the case of craft breweries, the taproom is so important. That’s your entry into the market. Your customers come in, you develop a following, people like your beer, they ask for it. Nobody’s going to want to put your beer on tap around town until people want to drink it.
Shaylee Ragar: Big Sky Brewing is a perfect example. They were excluded from the 1999 law because they had already outgrown the Legislature’s definition of a microbrewery. So they couldn’t sell pints on site at all. The company had hoped officials would expand the law the next session. But that didn’t happen for another 18 years.
Nabozney says Big Sky gave away roughly $8 million in free beer samples while waiting for the law to change. It was that important to their marketing strategy.
Austin Amestoy: That sounds like a real bear of an issue. Where is Montana at with it today? Did they find a path forward?
Shaylee Ragar: Yes, at least for now. Brewers and tavern owners decided to get to work on hashing out a compromise starting about two decades after that law that limited beers and hours was passed.
In 2023, both sides backed a proposal to allow brewers to purchase retail licenses in addition to their production licenses, and It passed the Legislature. Now brewers can buy-in to the same system as tavern owners, serve other types of alcohol and stay open later.
Leow says it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a win for now.
Matt Leow: I don’t think it’s the system that anybody would create today if we could start from scratch. But unfortunately, there’s a lot of money wrapped up into it and untying that knot is really complicated.
Austin Amestoy: Wow, you don’t seem to find a lot of true compromise like this at the Legislature. What does it mean for brewers today, in 2026?
Shaylee Ragar: Big picture, it’s strengthened their business models. About a third of brewers in Montana have decided to stack licenses.
I visited a newer establishment in the Flathead, the Ronan Cooperative Brewery. It’s the only co-op brewery in the state and was created as a citizen-led, economic revitalization project in 2020.
Lee Koch and her husband were early members of the co-op – even though beer isn’t her first choice of drink. But they love the community feel.
Lee Koch: You know what, I’m a Kolsch drinker, I’m not a real big beer fan. So I’ve been chomping at the bit here for them to get a wine license or a beer-wine license.
Shaylee Ragar: The brewery was able to get that stacked license and Koch can now get her favorite chardonnay there.
Austin Amestoy: What’s next for the brewing industry?
Shaylee Ragar: The regulatory battle definitely isn’t over. There are other changes they’d like to make. The industry nationwide is also facing a drop in demand, so brewers are having to fight a little harder to stay open.
Jim Myers, head brewer for the Ronan Co-op, feels positive about the future, regardless.
Jim Myers: Laws change, peoples’ opinions change, but liquids are still going to ferment and people are still going to drink them.
Austin Amestoy: Thanks for your reporting, Shaylee.
Shaylee Ragar: Happy to share what I learned!
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