Featured Beer List
Brewed fresh on-site by Lewis & Clark Brewing Company
About the Lewis & Clark Brewery
The Lewis & Clark Brewery is a state of the art brewing facility located in the heart of America's last great place - Montana. The great explorers are the inspiration for our breweries name and in many ways our brewing style. It's also where we live as we are located in the heart of the only Lewis & Clark County in the US. Our secret ingredient is the pride and craftsmanship added by the dedicated people lucky enough to be called Montanans. Since our beginning, we have gone to the greatest of lengths to build one of the most efficient, sophisticated breweries around with one goal in mind: to produce the finest ales & lagers possible and serve them at their peak of freshness. Our beers are hand crafted and un-pasteurized and are brewed to levels of quality, which can only be achieved in the finest of breweries. We are proud of what we do and are confident that everyone who drinks our beers will appreciate the care and craftsmanship served in every glass.
The brewing process starts at our silo where pale 2-row malt is stored (up to 25,000 lbs!). This malt is cracked in a roller mill along with the specialty malts required for a particular recipe. The milled malt, or grist, is transported by auger across the brewery to the grist hopper above the mash/lauter tun. Next is mashine where the grist is mixed with hot water in the mash tun. Over the course of a few hours, mashing converts starches in the malt to sugar.
This is followed by lautering in which the sweet liquid called wort is drawn off the bottom and pumped to the brewkettle. Once the brewkettle is full, the wort is brought to a boil. Bittering hops are added at the beginning of the boil, while hops used for aroma and flavor are added toward the end.
After the boil and brief settling period, the wort is cooled by pumping it through a heat exchanger. The cold wort is transferred through hoses to a temperature-controlled fermentation tank. Yeast is in the tank and this initiates fermentation, during which yeast cells ingest sugars in the wort to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. For ales, fermentation lasts 3 or 4 days. Lager fermentation is colder and slower, lasting one to two weeks. Cold conditioning or lagering of the beer takes place in the same tank. The temperature of the tank is held near freezing for anywhere from two weeks to two months, depending on the beer style.
Most of our beers are filtered (except our unfiltered hefeweizen "Miners Gold") by diatomaceous earth filter. This filters out yeast and other small particles to produce crystal clear beer. The finished beer is carbonated then kegged or bottled and stored in our walk-in cooler. Enjoy a Lewis & Clark Beer in Helena's only Brewpub the BREWHOUSE Pub & Grille.
Brewery Facts:
On bottling days
we bottle 6,000 to
10,000 bottles in a
day
Each tank is
holding about
1,500 gallons of
beer
We brew enough
Miner's Gold to fill
over 50,000 pints
a year
Five of our beers
are now available
in bottles in
various stores
across the state of
Montana