“HE WAS A WISE MAN WHO INVENTED BEER.”
—PLATO
“WHOEVER DRINKS BEER, HE IS QUICK TO SLEEP; WHOEVER SLEEPS LONG, DOES NOT SIN; WHOEVER DOES NOT SIN, ENTERS HEAVEN! THUS, LET US DRINK BEER!”
—MARTIN LUTHER
“BEER. IT’S THE BEST DAMN DRINK IN THE WORLD.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
“I WOULD KILL EVERYONE IN THIS ROOM FOR A DROP OF SWEET BEER.”
—HOMER SIMPSON
BEER.
It’s a simple four-letter word, and yet it’s so evocative, so powerful, so magnetic. Consider what some of the greatest thinkers of all time have said about beer:
For many, beer is a passion. We go out of our way to find high-quality brands or experiment with unfamiliar styles. We think about it, discuss its qualities, study it as if we are researching a dissertation, and generally obsess over it. But why? Why should we invest so much of ourselves into a beverage?
Well, for starters, beer makes us feel good. The simple act of touching a glass of beer to our lips releases endorphins—chemicals that produce feelings of pleasure in our brains. When consumed in moderation, beer is a healthy drink. It contains antioxidants that are good for our bodies. It contains large amounts of vitamin B, and because it contains polyphenols, as red wine does, it even helps to lower our risk of heart disease.
Probably most of all, we love beer because it’s a social beverage. We associate it with good times. We drink it when we are having fun with friends or even just chatting with a stranger at the bar. We drink it at the ballpark on a sunny day, celebrate a special occasion with it, and even court a potential mate with it.
Beer, it seems, nourishes us both physically and spiritually.
No beverage—other than water, obviously—has done more for Michigan than beer. Every ingredient that goes into beer—water, grain, hops, and yeast—is produced in Michigan. Coffee may power a state of hard-working people, but coffee is not produced here. And beer doesn’t make us jittery.
Of course, Michigan is not the only state that has beer. But Michigan is the only state that has Michigan beer. Michigan beer doesn’t have its own style, but there certainly is a Michigan beer pride that separates us from every other midwestern state.
Cardboard boxes are stacked in one corner of the brewhouse at Griffin Claw in Birmingham, waiting to be filled with cans to be shipped to the distributor.
Initially that pride grew out of Detroit, the home of the Stroh Brewery, which was at one time the third-largest brewery in the United States. But that pride took a major hit on Friday, May 31, 1985, when Stroh management closed its flagship brewery and 135 years of tradition came to an end. Even people who believed Stroh’s was only a step above unfiltered Detroit River water shed a tear at the news.
For most of the twentieth century, Stroh’s was the biggest brewery in Michigan, and its 1-million-square-foot brewery on Gratiot Avenue on the eastern edge of downtown was a landmark in Detroit—its friendly red neon STROH’S BEER sign on the top of the brewhouse greeted drivers coming into city at the start of a workday and S’HORTS REEB shone in their rearview mirrors on their way home.
The closing of Stroh’s Detroit brewery seemed to be just one more nail in the coffin for manufacturing in Michigan. Steel mills and auto plants were closing, and autoworkers were rapidly being replaced by robots and automation. In the Grand Rapids area, many furniture factories that drove western Michigan’s economy had closed or were closing. The decline of manufacturing led many Michigan residents to pick up roots and flee for new opportunities in the Sunbelt.
But the same year that Stroh’s closed in Detroit, a new model for the brewing industry was being born. In Kalamazoo, a young man named Larry Bell, a home brewer and owner of a brewing supply store, decided the time was right to open his own brewery. It would take nearly fifteen years for Bell’s brewery to flourish, but he would become the Obi Wan Kenobi of Michigan brewing.
While Bell is regarded as a rock star hero in brewery circles today, Ben Edwards, practically unknown and largely forgotten, is arguably a more important figure in seeding Michigan’s craft beer boom. In the mid-1980s, Edwards was a Detroit restaurateur and an early pioneer in the farm-to-table movement who longed to offer freshly brewed beer to his customers to complement his fresh-made breads and cheeses. When Edwards was not granted a brewer’s license by the state, he led the effort to change Michigan’s laws to allow for the creation of brewpubs.
Larry Bell, the founder of Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo, is considered by many the person who set the direction and provided inspiration for Michigan’s craft brewing industry.
Fermentation vessels at Short’s Brewing Company’s production brewery in Elk Rapids.
Together, Bell and Edwards would usher in a new golden age of brewing in Michigan.
In the wake of Stroh’s closing, high-quality breweries have popped up all over Michigan, and the state is now home to some of the most respected breweries in the country. Among them are:
• Bell’s Brewery, which is now the oldest continually operating brewery in the state. Although Larry Bell teetered on the edge of bankruptcy twice and was pressured by investors to change his brewing style to make beers that were more widely appealing, he stuck to his philosophy: make good beer.
• Founders Brewery in Grand Rapids. Like Bell’s, Founders draws beer tourists from all over the country to the taproom, particularly when the brewery releases one of its highly desired limited release brews like KBS.
• Short’s Brewing in Bellaire, which has put a tiny Antrim County town on the national map. Short’s has become a national leader in creative brewing, raking in awards for experimental beer at the Great American Beer Festival.
• Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales in Dexter, which was the first brewery in the country to bring an old Franco-Belgian brewing tradition to the United States and age all its beers in oak barrels. Brewer Ron Jeffries is viewed among his peers as a mensch for demanding that the beer be aged for as long as two years before bottling.
Atwater in the Park, in Grosse Pointe Park, occupies a building that was once Grace United Church of Christ.
But there’s more to the story than awards and respect. The brewing industry has been instrumental in helping to revive the economic fortunes of neighborhoods, towns, and entire cities. In 2014, brewing contributed more than $1.8 billion annually to Michigan’s economy, according to an economic impact report from the Brewers Association, a trade association for craft brewers.1 In 2015, Michigan ranked sixth in the number of craft breweries in the nation, and tenth in craft beer production.
Perhaps more important to beer lovers, the experience of visiting Michigan’s breweries is second to none. Breweries occupy old churches, onetime auto dealerships, rehabilitated retail spaces, and converted restaurants. They’re in big cities, tony suburbs, and farm towns. There’s even one place you can go to make your own beer in addition to drinking it.
Brewers themselves have developed an ethic of camaraderie, collegiality, and cooperation. The struggle to make and sell a quality product in the 1990s—before craft beer caught on—brought brewers together to face tough economic challenges as they worked to educate people that there is more to life than fizzy yellow beer. That ethic of cooperation first and competition second is somewhat common among brewers nationwide, but in Michigan, it seems the bond among brewers is just a little stronger.
Ron Jeffries of Jolly Pumpkin in the brewery’s Dexter Taproom.
Craft beer, of course, is still beer, and it’s made with the same ingredients that went into Stroh’s, but this new generation of Michigan’s brewers sees those ingredients as only a starting point. Beer today can be made with blueberries, pumpkins, asparagus, coffee, spices, and a myriad of other ingredients. These brewers see their work not as a job but as a craft, and they are reviving traditions that began in the seventeenth century when Europeans made beer on an artisanal scale. Those European brewing traditions came to North America first with English and Scottish immigrants, then with the Irish, Germans, and Slavs. Some brewers are staying true to the old traditions, while others are giving those traditions a twist.
While I was researching this book, brewer after brewer told me two things that they cherish about their craft: they love what they do because they work in an industry where they never stop learning, and they are attracted to beer in a quest for knowledge and novelty. They appreciate gaining a better understanding of the history of beer and its different styles; learning more about the ingredients that go into beer has deepened their appreciation for what they produce. At the same time, they still get excited when they encounter or create something new and unusual.
Although brewers have driven many of the changes in the Michigan beer scene, consumers have caught up and are now having considerable impact. Drinkers—particularly young drinkers—have shifted away from their father’s lagers and have embraced more creative ales. Millennials are exerting their influence on the food culture in general by demanding locally made high-quality products, rejecting relatively inexpensive mass-produced items. Some young people proudly brag that they have never consumed a Bud Light.
The combination of those cultural shifts has made craft brewing a powerful movement that has in turn spurred other trends. As Michigan’s beer enthusiasts demand locally made beers, Michigan brewers increasingly seek local ingredients. That has led to a renaissance in Michigan barley farming as well as malting and hops farming and processing.
But more than anything else, Michigan is the Great Beer State because of the individuals who are motivated by a passion for excellence and creativity. Michigan’s brewers and beer drinkers have created a new culture, one that values quality over quantity, individuality within a community, and equal parts tradition and innovation. In a state that has been economically beaten and battered for forty years, brewing gives Michigan a new identity and restores our reputation as a place where products are thoughtfully engineered and carefully constructed. Beer—like the automobile—is now a part of the soul of this state.
Look at the top states in craft beer production and notice that five of them—California, Oregon, Colorado, North Carolina, and Michigan—share common characteristics: amazing natural resources and outdoor experiences, a rich agricultural heritage, creative and hardworking people, and a culture of innovation. But there’s a difference between Michigan and those other states, and that’s our spirit and our pride. That spirit is what makes Michigan the Great Beer State today and into the future.
This book owes an acknowledgment to Peter Blum, the former Stroh Brewery executive and author of Brewed in Detroit: Breweries and Beer since 1830. Blum’s book, published by Wayne State University Press in 1998, is an outstanding history of brewing in Detroit and Michigan through the last decade of the twentieth century. Many brewers in the state told me they have read Blum’s book—sometimes more than once—for its insight into the state’s rich brewing tradition. But in the two decades since Blum’s book appeared, the entire landscape of Michigan brewing has changed. In 1998, the state had only a handful of microbreweries, and the craft beer industry that dominates Michigan beer today was in its infancy. It is safe to say that Blum had no idea how much the craft brewing industry would grow and prosper.
That said, brewing is an industry that has always been in flux. Brewers have come and gone, and beer styles have risen and declined in popularity. The one constant is passion. Brewers are passionate about beer. They take what they do very seriously and come to work with one goal in mind: to make the today’s beer better than yesterday’s.
Even other brewers are eying Michigan with a mix of wonder and envy. In his keynote address to the Michigan Brewers Guild’s annual winter conference in January 2017, Jim Koch, the co-founder and chairman of the company that brews the Boston-based Samuel Adams brands, said, referring to Michigan: “This is the best time, and the best place in the history of the world, to be a beer drinker. One hundred years from now, brewers will look back and say, ‘I wish I could have been a part of this group.’”2
That passion has helped to burnish Michigan’s image in the eyes of the nation. In 2014, Thrillist.com ranked Michigan as the fourth best beer state. The Beer Advocate website names Founders’ CBS Imperial Stout the fifth best beer in the world and KBS (previously known as Kentucky Breakfast Stout) the fifteenth best. In fact, KBS has such a cult following that Founders and other businesses in Grand Rapids devote an entire week to the release of this limited edition brew every March, and beer tourists from around the country flock to the city to raise a pint.
So the goal of this book—forgive the pun—is to tap into Michigan’s passion for beer. It is not a guide to Michigan’s breweries; the brewing scene is changing so quickly that any book would be obsolete upon publication. Therefore, it also made no sense to attempt to visit every single brewery in the state. And I apologize in advance if you feel I overlooked your favorite breweries. At the start of the project, I made a list of breweries I thought it was important to write about. Some that I wanted to feature did not reciprocate the interest. We will leave it at that.
This book has a wide-ranging brief. Yes, it explores a new generation of brewers that is setting Michigan apart, the dramatic changes that have occurred in the state’s brewing community over the past two decades, and the history of Michigan’s craft beer movement. Brewed in Michigan also looks at the ethos of cooperation and support that has developed among brewers, how beer is revitalizing neighborhoods and communities, and how brewers today have thrown away old recipe books and are breaking taboos and pushing style boundaries to create new, unusual, creative, and just plain crazy stuff.
Tenacity Brewing Company in Flint.
The advent of brewery taprooms and brewpubs has caused a change in the drinking culture as well. Craft beer is responsible for building communities and bringing people together. Sit in a brewery taproom and look around. Compared to the corner bar, where it’s always dark so you don’t see the stains on the carpet, craft brewery taprooms are open, airy, and clean. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, it’s surprising how many families visit a brewery taproom for a meal. Even though the clientele shifts at night, taprooms aren’t a place for the surly guy who wants to be alone at the bar or for the party boy looking to get trashed. Brewery taprooms and brewpubs are warm and welcoming places. Some have music. Some offer trivia nights. Some have board games. Taprooms have become places where people gather for conversation to talk about families, current events, ways to improve cities and neighborhoods, and raise money for charities. Beer is beer, but craft beer is something more—it’s a conduit to conversation.
But before we explore this new universe of brewing, let’s start by asking a simple question: if beer is beer, what do Michigan’s brewers do today that makes their beer different and special?
The taproom of Blackrocks Brewery is in an old house in a funky neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown Marquette.
