Bell's Brewery and the Soup Kettle That Started a Revolution
Near Kalamazoo, Michigan
In September of nineteen eighty-five, Larry Bell brewed his first batch of commercial beer in a fifteen-gallon soup kettle on the second floor of a building in downtown Kalamazoo. He covered the fermentation vessels with plastic wrap. He produced one hundred thirty-five barrels that first year, which is roughly the output of a very productive home brewer.
Bell had started two years earlier in nineteen eighty-three, not as a brewery but as a homebrewing supply shop. The leap from selling yeast and grain to other hobbyists to actually brewing and selling beer was driven partly by curiosity and partly by the conviction that the mass-produced lagers dominating American shelves in the early nineteen eighties were not the full story of what beer could be.
He was not wrong, and he was not alone, but he was early. Bell's Brewery, which he initially called the Kalamazoo Brewing Company, is the oldest existing craft brewery in Michigan and the oldest craft brewery east of Colorado in the United States. When he opened that pub in nineteen ninety-three, the first brewery taproom in Michigan, the craft beer movement that now defines American drinking culture was still something many people in the industry considered a passing novelty.
The beers Bell's became most famous for are quietly named after Michigan geography. Two Hearted Ale takes its name from the Two Hearted River in the Upper Peninsula. It was ranked the best beer in America by the American Homebrewers Association for three consecutive years, from twenty seventeen through twenty nineteen. Hopslam, a double India Pale Ale released each January, became famous enough that people drove from surrounding states to buy it on release day.
In twenty twenty-one, Larry Bell sold the brewery to Lion, an Australian company owned by the Japanese conglomerate Kirin. Bell's is now part of a global portfolio. But the soup kettle and the plastic wrap are the beginning of the story, and they happened here, in a city that was figuring out what it wanted to be after the paper mills and the guitar factory and the cab company had all moved on.
