Bell's Brewery - History

History

Larry Bell founded Kalamazoo Brewing Company in 1983 as a home-brewing supply shop. In 1985, it began to sell its own beer, producing 135 barrels in its first year. These first batches of beer were brewed in a 15-US-gallon (57 L) soup kettle and fermented in open fermenters covered with Saran Wrap.

The brewery today consists of two separate brewing facilities, the original Kalamazoo Avenue facility, and the state-of-the-art Krum Avenue Plant, in Comstock Township, Michigan, which opened in 2002. The Kalamazoo Avenue brewery contains an attached pub—Bell's Eccentric Cafe—and a store which sells Bell's beer and apparel, as well as homebrewing supplies. Former Bell's brewer Tom "Elvis" Fuller now owns the formerly Bell-owned Old Hat Brewery in Lawton, Michigan.

In 1996, Bells changed the name of its flagship summer beer from Solsun to Oberon as a result of legal action by the Mexican brewing company Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, makers of a beer with a similar name: El Sol (The Sun).

As of 2005, Kalamazoo Brewing Company changed their name to Bell's Brewery, Inc., reflecting the name by which most people refer to the brewery.

Ground was broken in April of 2011 as construction began for a new production facility in Comstock, Michigan. The facility opened in May, 2012 and increased the company's brewing capacity from 180,000 barrels to 500,000 barrels per year. The new facility is equipped with state of the art brewing technology, including an expanded grain-handling system and a 200 barrel brewing system. The grain system allows brewers to mill 2,000 lbs of grain in approximately 4 minutes, versus the old system which took an hour to mill the same amount.