Beer City Before and After Prohibition
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
Grand Rapids has been brewing beer for nearly as long as it has been a city.
The first official brewery opened in eighteen forty-four, when a German-trained brewmaster named Christoph Kusterer set up shop. He was followed by waves of German and Dutch immigrants who brought continental brewing traditions with them, and by the eighteen nineties the city supported multiple competing operations. In eighteen ninety-three, six of those local breweries joined forces, closed their individual plants, and built a single large facility called the Grand Rapids Brewing Company. The combined operation was designed to compete at scale with national players like Anheuser-Busch.
It worked, until it did not. Michigan adopted statewide prohibition in nineteen seventeen, two and a half years before the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect nationally. The breweries closed. When federal prohibition ended in nineteen thirty-three, the industry that came back in Grand Rapids was a ghost of what had been there. Fox Deluxe Brewing, the lone survivor, moved to Chicago in nineteen fifty-one, and that was it. For decades, Grand Rapids had not a single brewery.
The revival came slowly, then all at once. Founders Brewing Company opened in nineteen ninety-seven. Its early years were nearly fatal. The co-founders survived on bartending tips when the taproom was slow, and the company nearly folded in nineteen ninety-nine. What saved it was a decision to stop brewing conventional styles and start making bold, unconventional beers for people who actually wanted them. Their operating philosophy, brewed for us, attracted a following, then a national reputation.
By two thousand twelve, Grand Rapids tied Asheville, North Carolina in an online poll naming America's best beer city. The next year it won outright. The city has held the Beer City USA title more or less continuously since, with nearly forty breweries operating in the metro area and over forty thousand beer tourists visiting annually.
The arc from Kusterer's eighteen forty-four brewery to a nationally ranked craft beer scene runs through Prohibition, decades of silence, and a near-bankruptcy, none of which turned out to be the end of anything.
