5 BEER MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND
THERE’S A NEW LIBRARY GOING IN HERE, AN OUTDOOR AMPHITHEATER, A CLEAN-UP OF THE CREEK, A BOARDWALK WITH A WETLAND AREA AND A PARK. PHASE TWO IS ADDING A COMMUNITY CENTER AND A REC CENTER…. I THINK MAYBE [OPENING THE BREWERY] PLAYED A SMALL PART…. WE’RE SEEING A BUSTLING, VIBRANT LIVELY COMMUNITY AGAIN.
-DAVID RINGLER, OWNER AND DIRECTOR OF HAPPINESS, CEDAR SPRINGS BREWING COMPANY
It wasn’t an accident that the inaugural Great Lakes Hop and Barley Conference was held in Grand Rapids in 2015. After all, Grand Rapids proudly bears the title of Beer City USA. After tying for the honor with Asheville, North Carolina, in a national poll in 2012, it won the title outright in 2013, and again in 2016 in a poll sponsored by USA Today.
But Grand Rapids is also a great place to hold a conference because it’s an exciting, growing community with lots to offer a visitor. There’s the John Ball Zoo and Frederik Meijer Gardens, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Grand Rapids Public Museum, the annual Art Prize festival, a downtown farmers’ market that’s open seven days a week, and an assortment of other festivals and events.
Yet beer is no small part of what makes Grand Rapids a great town. Over the past twenty years, beer has been an economic catalyst that has transformed Grand Rapids as it has other cities, communities, and neighborhoods across Michigan.
Like many cities in the 1970s and 1980s, Grand Rapids saw its population shrink and the city’s core go on life support as people fled to the suburbs and the green spaces of the exurbs. Certainly the opening of the Van Andel Arena in 1996 and DeVos Place Conference Center in 2004 spurred investment in downtown Grand Rapids, but the city lacked an identity—and hipness—until the Founders Brewing Company took off.
The brewery opened in 1997 in a former warehouse on Monroe Avenue Northwest just north of downtown. Owners Dave Engbers and Mike Stevens could have chosen a nice spot in the suburbs with lower rent and fewer problems. But they selected their location because they wanted to be a part of the culture of their hometown.
The funny thing is, they didn’t just become part of the culture of Grand Rapids. They changed it completely.
Before Founders hit its stride, Grand Rapids was known as a town with conservative values that rolled up its streets on the evenings and weekends. Now, Grand Rapids is a vibrant destination known for good beer and a thriving art community.
Michael Pecoraro of New Baltimore has seen the change, too. He’s in the financial services industry and used to have an office at Division Avenue South and Fulton Street, only a half mile away from where Founders built a new brewery and taproom on Grandville Avenue Southwest. Before Founders moved to the south side of downtown Grand Rapids, there was no reason for a tourist to visit an area where homelessness, drug use, and prostitution were common. “Now they have lofts and restaurants,” Pecoraro says. “Beer has a ton to do with it. That sense of community has been improved largely because of beer. I don’t know if that’s a fact, but I feel that.”
Founders’ success has spurred other brewers to invest in the city. On the north side of downtown Grand Rapids, Detroit’s Atwater Brewery has moved into the first floor of an old eight-story hotel that was renovated for apartments and condos. On the west side of downtown, New Holland Brewing Company occupies the first floor of a new mixed-use residential building that takes up almost an entire city block. Slightly farther west of there, Grand Rapids’ own Harmony Brewing Company has added a second location that ties into the Polish and Lithuanian flavor of its historically blue-collar neighborhood.
But although other breweries have expanded to take advantage of Grand Rapids’ beer buzz, for tourists and visitors, Founders is the main draw. Walk through the parking lot at the Founders taproom and look at license plates. There are cars from all over the United States and Canada. Stroll through the brewery’s taproom and you will see beer tourists tasting a flight and recording their thoughts on paper or on a smartphone app. These people probably would not have come to Grand Rapids without the presence of Founders and the Beer City designation. But here they are, also generating revenue for the city’s hotels, restaurants, art galleries, nightclubs, gas stations, museums, and other breweries.
The same kind of energy is transforming communities on a much smaller scale in other parts of Michigan. A few miles north of Grand Rapids, the opening of the Cedar Springs Brewing Company in 2015 kicked off a new round of investment in a town that had been best known for its annual festival celebrating red flannel underwear. In southeastern Michigan, Batch Brewing Company is helping to rejuvenate Corktown, the city’s oldest neighborhood.
Cedar Springs Brewing Company’s taproom pays homage to traditional German beer halls.
Even the State of Michigan sees the economic benefit of brewing. In August 2016, the Michigan Strategic Fund gave a $250,000 grant to Cellar Brewing Company to assist it in the move from a location on the outskirts of Sparta into a former drugstore in the heart of the city. The agency believes the move will generate nineteen jobs when the nearly $2 million renovation is complete.
The presence of a craft brewery is one of eleven indicators that a city will be successful going forward, according to the Atlantic magazine’s national correspondent James Fallows. Fallows’s list of indicators included things like the presence of a research university and effective public-private partnerships. He concludes: “One final marker, perhaps the most reliable: A city on the way back will have one or more craft breweries, and probably some small distilleries too…. A town that has craft breweries also has a certain kind of entrepreneur, and a critical mass of mainly young (except for me) customers. You may think I’m joking, but just try to find an exception.”10
Bart Watson, the chief economist for the Brewers Association, the not-for-profit trade organization for craft brewers, says that even though he doesn’t have any data, he does have anecdotal evidence that the presence of a brewery or breweries is a factor when people decide whether they are going to live in a certain neighborhood or location. A brewery, Watson maintains, gives the impression that a community or neighborhood is a vibrant place.
Watson says that cities with foresight are now welcoming breweries into brownfield areas that are zoned for manufacturing. A brewery provides an attraction that brings people into what may have been a depressed, neglected, or just plain forgotten area. Once a brewery brings people in, the area suddenly becomes attractive for residents, and that factor in turn brings in additional business. Suddenly a once-rundown area has become a hip and desirable one—just like the south side of downtown Grand Rapids.