Larry Bell, a homebrew store and the Kalamazoo Brewing Company.

Bell’s Brewery is the Michigan craft brewery founded by Larry Bell in Kalamazoo — not the Scotch whisky that shares its name. It began as a shop. The company’s own timeline says Bell opened a homebrew supply store in downtown Kalamazoo in 1983, and English Wikipedia says the business was incorporated that year as the Kalamazoo Brewing Company, Inc.

Brewing followed two years later. The company says that in 1985, still trading as Kalamazoo Brewing Co., it began brewing in a 15-gallon soup pot and sold its first beer on 19 September that year. That first beer was Great Lakes Amber Ale, sold today simply as Amber Ale, which Bell’s calls “the beer that built the brewery.” The timeline records production of 135 barrels in 1986, the first year of Third Coast Beer; a porter followed in 1987, a run of stouts and Third Coast Ale in 1988, and Expedition Stout in 1989, the year Rave Associates became the brewery’s first wholesaler.

The downtown site grew. The company says a 15-barrel brewing system went in during 1992, and that on 11 June 1993 it opened the Eccentric Café, which it describes as the first onsite pub at a Michigan brewery; a beer garden was added beside it in 1996, and the café reopened after renovation in 2011. English Wikipedia says the firm legally changed its name from Kalamazoo Brewing Company to Bell’s Brewery, Inc. in 2006, and describes Bell’s as the oldest existing craft brewery in Michigan.

Two Hearted, Oberon and a brewery in Comstock.

Two beers carry the name further than any others. Two Hearted Ale, an India pale ale named for the Two Hearted River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, English Wikipedia says, made its debut in 1997 as a winter seasonal, according to the company. It became a year-round beer in 2003 and in 2013 overtook Oberon as the brewery’s best-seller, Bell’s says. In the annual poll of American Homebrewers Association members published in Zymurgy, it ranked second from 2010 to 2016 and first from 2017 to 2019, English Wikipedia says; MLive reported the second-place finish in June 2011.

Oberon, a wheat ale, is the brewery’s summer beer. The company says it was first brewed in 1992 under the name SolSun, and English Wikipedia lists it as a seasonal sold from late March through September in most markets. Its release is marked each spring by Oberon Day, which Bell’s still promotes in 2026. Other names on the long list include Hopslam, a double IPA first brewed in 2004 and released each January, Kalamazoo Stout, Expedition Stout and the Christmas Ale; Official Hazy IPA arrived in 2019, the company says.

Growth moved the brewing out of the city. Bell’s says it bought five acres in Comstock Township, about seven miles from the original downtown brewery, in 2001, brewed its first Comstock beer in December 2002 and opened the brewery there in 2003. It added a 200-barrel brewhouse in 2012, and English Wikipedia says the larger Comstock plant raised annual capacity from 180,000 to 500,000 barrels. The company’s timeline records shipments of more than 100,000 barrels in 2008, 200,000 in 2012 and 300,000 in 2014. A sister brewery, Upper Hand, began brewing in Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula in 2014; English Wikipedia says Upper Hand was sold in 2024 to Seven Beverages, Inc., of California. Larry Bell received an achievement award from the Brewers Association in 2010, the company says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all American beer names: Busch, Natural Light, Keystone Light, Rolling Rock, Bell’s, Deschutes and Allagash. American beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from independent breweries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger brewing groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a stadium bar.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle or can than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packaged.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Bell family to Lion and New Belgium.

For most of its life Bell’s was a family company. English Wikipedia says that in late 2012 the Bell family bought back all the stock held by outside investors. On 10 November 2021 the brewery announced that Larry Bell had reached an agreement to sell Bell’s to Lion, the Australian-based brewer that had bought Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing in 2019, and that he was retiring; he shared the news at the company’s annual all-employee event, the release says. Lion is part of the Japanese Kirin group, and English Wikipedia says the sale closed at the end of 2021.

The announcement set out what would stay the same. It described a brewery of about 550 employees and a 500,000-barrel plant in Comstock, said Bell’s beers would not change, and said its people would keep working mainly in Kalamazoo. Executive vice-president Carrie Yunker, with 18 years at Bell’s, would lead day-to-day operations and report to New Belgium’s chief executive, while Laura Bell, Larry Bell’s daughter, a shareholder and board member, said she supported the sale. At the time Bell’s sold in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico; English Wikipedia now lists all 50 states, and says that in 2021 Bell’s was the sixth-largest craft brewery in the United States, citing the Brewers Association.

The brewery has had one well-known distribution dispute. English Wikipedia says Bell’s withdrew from the Illinois market in October 2006 after its distributor tried to sell the distribution rights to a competitor, came back in 2007 through new distributors with beers sold under the Kalamazoo name, and returned its main brands in August 2008.

A naming note matters when searching. “Bell’s” is also a blended Scotch whisky, which has no connection to the Michigan brewery, and the brewery’s first decades were spent under the Kalamazoo Brewing Company name, so older references may use that instead.

For a design guide, Bell’s shows how a founder’s surname, a homebrew-shop origin and a river in the Upper Peninsula can carry a brand from a single café to national distribution, and how a brewery keeps its founder’s name after joining a larger group. Compare Deschutes, the Bend brewpub that opened three years after Bell’s first beer, and Kirin, the group that now stands behind it. For this guide we use Great Lakes blue, amber ale and Kalamazoo brick with a book serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bell’s Brewery’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.