USA, MT: Cross Country Brewing eyeing mid-May opening in Glendive

A new Eastern Montana business is hoping to produce 200 barrels a year, but it won’t be oil in the tanks at the old Cross Petroleum office building in Glendive, Billings Gazette reported on March 16.

Family-owned brewery Cross Country Brewing is eyeing a mid-May opening at its East Allard Street location, where customers will be able to enjoy a variety of brother-brewed beers.

The brewery will be operated by Justin and Lonnie Cross; their two sons, Elliot and John; and their sons' wives, Jenay and Kathy.

John Cross, a land surveyor, and Elliot Cross, a music teacher at Huntley Project, share the brewing duties. The two took up brewing as a hobby more than half a decade ago. Opening day should have taps reserved for John's recipes — a brown ale and an American pale ale — and Elliot's recipes — an India pale ale and an Irish red.

Already familiar with breweries in the region, a June 2011 road trip brought the brothers and their wives together, with the goal of seeing as many Western Montana breweries as possible in a week. The group ended up hitting 27 breweries by week's end.

Adding to the challenge was Kathy Cross’ dislike of beer.

“We ended up dragging Kathy on this statewide, 1,500-mile trip, and she kind of had to learn to like the taste of beer,” John Cross said.

Kathy Cross' perspective has helped John Cross tailor some of the brewery's core recipes to what he calls "a more universally accepted kind of beer."

As interest in opening a brewery began to build, the family reached out to a relative who owns the decades-old Cross Petroleum building. It hadn’t been actively used in years, and the city was considering tearing it down, said Justin Cross.

A building that needed some work was preferable to starting from scratch, Justin Cross said, particularly because he and Lonnie Cross are retired.

“We didn’t want to go into hock and start out like we’re 20 again,” Justin Cross said. “We wanted to bootstrap it if we could.”

Bootstrapping it in this case involved the family, starting in November 2015, “knocking a few walls down, pouring some cement, putting doors in,” and dropping the floor 18 inches in parts of the building.

Helping the cause is a $45,000 grant from the Montana Growth Through Agriculture program for brewery equipment; they were eligible for the grant because they plan to use malted grain from Great Falls, John Cross said.

Used furniture has been fixed up, tile from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore has gone into the bathrooms, and windows that have come out of old buildings in town will help make up the interior.

"That's one of the things that's really neat about breweries in Montana: They kind of revitalize things that have been set aside, buildings that have not been occupied," Elliot Cross said. "They utilize a lot of existing structures and they're really conscious about reusing and recycling."

There are no plans for a kitchen at this point, but there are plans to organize for food trucks to stop by the brewery. Seating will be for around 40 and the brewery will be open Thursday through Sunday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Trivia nights have been discussed, as have sip and paint nights helmed by longtime painter Justin Cross. Another feature of the brewery will be a large map where customers can pin their starting locations in a hat-tip to the cross-country theme of the brewery.

There are also plans to have rotating nonalcoholic sodas, including ginger ale, cream ale and root beer.

Growler fills will be available and the family is also contemplating a mug club. Four beers are planned for the start, with an ultimate goal of six beers including seasonal brews. Of the seasonal beers John Cross has his eye on making a blueberry beer made with blueberries from a cousin’s Washington blueberry farm.

Efforts to survey and refine recipes have continued in the form of family-hosted tasting parties and even a closed Facebook group where Kathy Cross says trusted confidants offer honest assessments of recipes.

Beers have been brought for testing to softball games and even weddings in Billings, Colorado and Washington.

For Justin Cross, the ultimate litmus test is what he calls the Empty Keg Theory.

“If you go to the keg three months later and you’ve still got beer you’re trying to give away and you can’t get a dog to drink it, then you don’t have a winner," he said.

“If you go to the keg and you pull the tap and nothing comes out and you made the product two days ago, that’s a pretty good test."

16 March, 2016