In 2016, the people of Ronan sat down to take stock of their town. A working, walkable downtown kept coming up as a priority. One idea stuck: a brewery and taproom on Main Street that the community would own together.
The model was simple, and it had never been tried in Montana. Anyone could become a member-owner for $250. One membership, one vote, no single owner calling the shots. The first community meeting, in April 2017, drew more than fifty people. The cooperative formally incorporated in October 2017. By the time the doors opened, nearly 600 neighbors had bought in.
Mission West worked alongside the founding committee on the parts that hold a cooperative together: the legal structure, the membership campaign, and the board governance that keeps a member-owned business accountable to the people who built it.
The Ronan Cooperative Brewery opened on Main Street in September 2020, Montana’s first consumer-owned cooperative brewery. It took the former Masonic Lodge and turned it into the kind of gathering place those early meetings had imagined. It started with a conversation about what a downtown could be.
