New brewery opens in downtown Kalispell

In two months, Kalispell has gone from the biggest city in Montana with only one brewery to a blossoming bastion of beer.

Bias Brewing opened last weekend in its new space at 409 1st Avenue East in downtown Kalispell. It is the second new brewery to open in the city in as many months.

The brewery will look to turn some of the industry standards on its head, according to Amanda Robertson, who owns the business with her husband and head brewer, Adam.

It is standard fare for a brewery to have several flagship beers — options customers can expect for as long as the brewery continues to stand. On top of that, many breweries also have several rotating specials, a beer version of the chef’s choice, which tend to change with the seasons and only last for a batch or two.

Amanda and Adam at Bias have no intention of sticking to flagship beers — at least, not at first. They have an experimental streak to nurture, and they said that while it is possible they would settle on a few popular choices, they plan on rotating all their taps at the beginning.

“As far as I’m concerned, all of our beers are rotators,” Adam said. “We try to be nontraditional.”

The strategy suits well for their eclectic tap list, featuring beers like a blackberry sour, a pale ale steeped in black tea leaves and a chocolate porter that has been rested on cacao nibs.

The selections are rooted in Adam’s eight years as an experimental home brewer, an endeavor Amanda supported and helped out with from time to time.

The building is very much a labor of love. Amanda and Adam used reclaimed wood they gathered from interior walls in the building during the renovation to build many other parts of the current space, including the paneling behind the bar and wall hangings that sit above each booth.

“Adam and Amanda built this bar, they built everything” said Gabe Mariman, director of business development for the new brewery. “Adam learned how to weld while welding the first chair, then he built every stool, chair and booth.”

That ingenuity extends to the back of the house as well. Rather than pouring all their beer into standard-sized tanks to serve at the bar, Adam drove to Idaho to pick up old dairy tanks from a Chobani yogurt factory.

They brought them back, and paid a local welder to make the modifications necessary to hold entire tanks of beer. The inventions will help their business, saving time on kegging and preventing instances of a keg blowing in the middle of a busy night and needing to be replaced.

Because of that and a complex plumbing job, they are sitting on a cold room full of tanks that will hold about 30,000 12-ounce pours.

The late addition of a commercial kitchen also sets the brewery apart from its Kalispell neighbors. Rather than operate the kitchen themselves as a restaurant, they have established a relationship with Food for the Soul, a popular food cart in the valley, to cook and serve food to their customers.

The two have managed all of this development while still working full-time jobs to support their endeavors. Amanda has a background in electrical engineering, and Adam’s is in information technology.

“A lot of this work has been done between five in the afternoon and five in the morning,” Amanda said. “It’s been ready several times and we decided we wanted to squeeze in another thing.”

Their backgrounds have also informed a lot of their decisions in creating the business. Many brewing systems are powered by gas burners or steam boilers, but theirs is electric.

It is also what gave them the brewery name. In electrical engineering, to bias a circuit is to give it enough power to complete it. Adam home-brewed for eight years, a time in which they talked about opening a brewery, just as many people do while making beer in their own home and sharing it with friends.

“It’s the electric equivalent of overcoming inertia,” Amanda said.

In this case, their bias was months of construction and planning and obtaining permits amounting to hundreds of hours of investment, but it has finally paid off in the form of a completed project.

The unique set of new ideas, combined with a prolonged effort to keep the public abreast of their development on social media over the 15 months they’ve been working on the property, led to a booming opening weekend.

“It was insane,” Amanda said. “I did zero promotional effort and we had hundreds of people here.”

Aside from a snafu caused by an air conditioner going out, the opening went quite well, she said.

The couple has no plans to can or bottle, but do have enough brewing capacity to change that later on.

“Our focus is on getting people in here to try it,” Adam said.

They also sell cold brew coffee on nitro in the mornings and through the evening, and 50 cents of each cup goes to the Flathead Community Foundation to be dispersed among all the local nonprofits they represent. They also donate portions of their $119 beer club memberships to the organization.

“This isn’t just about beer for Adam and I,” Amanda said. “This is our family, this is how we want to be a part of the community. We wanted to be poised when we opened up to know what we could give back.”

Bias Brewing is open from 12 to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Beginning in the second week of July, that is likely to expand to seven days a week. More information can be found on their Facebook page.

Reporter Peregrine Frissell can be reached at (406) 758-4438 or pfrissell@dailyinterlake.com.