Kessler Tapestry

Three decades ago, Reinhard and Trudy Schulte, a flush couple from Bavaria, had an idea: open a small, more traditional brewery in Montana. The idea was born of the necessity of finding decent beer not only in an America awash in watery light lagers, but in one of the nation’s most sparsely populated states. In the mid-1980s, Montana had about 800,000 people spread over its more than 147,000 square miles (that’s nearly three North Carolinas). The Schultes lived on several hundred acres outside of Missoula, a city near the Idaho border best-known as the home of the University of Montana, so they picked it for their brewery.