Two homebrewers, an old street name and a photograph of brewers on a barrel.

Founders Brewing Co. is a brewery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, set up by Mike Stevens and Dave Engbers, two homebrewers who had recently left college, English Wikipedia says. MLive reported in April 2013 that the business was founded in Grand Rapids in 1997, and the company still signs itself “Born & Brewed in Michigan since 1997.” English Wikipedia, citing Michigan’s corporate filings, says the company was first organised in 1996 under another name and became Canal Street Brewing Co. in 1997, the legal name it still trades under.

The name on the bottles came about almost by accident. MLive explained in 2013 that Canal Street was the old name of Monroe Avenue, where the brewery first stood, in a part of the city where several breweries had worked in the 1800s; Stevens told the paper the pair were “playing off of this whole throwback thing.” Early bottle labels carried a historic black-and-white photograph of four local brewers sitting on a large wooden barrel, with the word “Founders” printed above it. Stevens said the word stood for the original brewers of Grand Rapids, but customers began calling the brewery Founders because that was what the label said, and the name stuck.

The early years were hard. The company says Stevens and Engbers opened a 9,800-square-foot brewery downtown, at first open three days a week, tended the bar themselves and came close to bankruptcy, at one point facing a lockout by their landlord over unpaid rent. The turn came, the company says, when the pair decided to brew the beers they wanted to drink: big, complex ales such as Dirty Bastard, and stouts aged in bourbon barrels. In 2007 the brewery moved to a larger site, a former trucking depot on what is now César E. Chávez Avenue; the company gives the grand opening as 20 November 2007.

Stouts aged underground and an IPA brewed for the whole day.

The beer that made Founders famous among enthusiasts is KBS, short for Kentucky Breakfast Stout. English Wikipedia describes it as an imperial stout brewed with coffee and chocolate and aged in bourbon barrels in former gypsum mines near Grand Rapids. For years it was released once a year, in April; the company announced in February 2020 that KBS would be brewed year-round. A sibling, CBS or Canadian Breakfast Stout, was released only now and then; the Detroit Free Press reported in August 2019 that there were no plans to brew it again, and it returned as a limited release in 2023.

Beer raters took notice. MLive reported in April 2010 that Founders won four medals at that year’s World Beer Cup in Chicago, and English Wikipedia says RateBeer users placed it among the top three breweries in the world in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

The everyday counterpart is All Day IPA, a lighter-strength IPA. The company says it was formulated by its brewer Jeremy Kosmicki, who brewed the first batch.

The labels have met regulators more than once. English Wikipedia says Dirty Bastard could not be sold in Alabama until 2012 because of its name, and MLive reported in August 2015 that the Breakfast Stout label, which showed a small child eating oatmeal, ran into Michigan rules on depicting children on alcohol, leading to a temporary change. A racial-discrimination lawsuit brought by a former employee in 2018, which Founders denied, drew wide coverage in October 2019 and was settled out of court that month, WOOD TV reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drinks names: Founders, Coors Light, Akashi, Proper No. Twelve, UV, Cappelletti and Select. Drinks brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A drinks 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 production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and bottled.

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

From a Michigan craft brewery to part of a Spanish brewing group.

Growth brought a partner from Madrid. In December 2014 Founders announced that the Spanish brewer Mahou San Miguel, owner of Mahou, had bought a 30 per cent minority stake, English Wikipedia says; Forbes reported in 2017 that a stake of that size meant the Brewers Association no longer counted the brewery as “craft.” The Spanish company in turn brought Founders beers to Spain, ABC reported in November 2015.

In August 2019 Founders said it would sell a further 60 per cent to Mahou San Miguel, giving the Spanish group majority control, the Detroit Free Press and MiBiz reported; English Wikipedia says Stevens and Engbers each kept 5 per cent. The company says it reached distribution in all 50 states by 2019, and that in 2023 it was formally integrated with Avery Brewing of Boulder, Colorado, and Mahou Imports of Miami to form Mahou USA. The brewery and its original taproom are in Grand Rapids; a second taproom in Detroit opened in 2017 and closed on 1 May 2023, the Detroit Free Press reported. In 2026 the company announced KBS Bourbon, a small-batch Kentucky bourbon finished in KBS barrels, as its first spirit.

The name needs care online: “founders” is a common word, used by many unrelated firms and funds, and the brewery’s own site is foundersbrewing.com.

For a design guide, Founders Brewing shows how a single borrowed photograph and a word printed above it became the name of a brewery, and how a brand born of throwback labels kept its Grand Rapids roots through two decades of growth. Compare Mahou, the Madrid brewer at the head of its owner, and Shiner, the Texas brewery known for its bock. For this guide we use barrel amber, stout brown and cellar black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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