Craft brewer Bell’s unveils new brewhouse and muses on a sale
Why would any sane brewer want to use open wooden fermenters? Why indeed. The answer is: because he wants to. When I visited Bell’s new brewhouse in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in June, I was shown a hall where they had fanned out the parts of four 100 year old cypress-wood fermenters. These fermenters were used at Stroh’s Brewery until the late 1950s or early 1960s and have been sitting in a warehouse in the Detroit area for more than 50 years. They are 12 feet in diameter and will stand about 8 feet tall. Stroh’s was one of the largest breweries in the country until it closed in 1985, the same year Bell’s sold its first beer.
When John Mallett, the Production Manager at Bell’s Brewery, heard about the fermenters, he and brewery owner Larry Bell agreed that it would be a great idea to rebuild them. The project is large and complicated, given the age and state of the equipment. Bell’s Brewery has no timeline for when it will make beer. But it’s certainly a project they will enjoy pursuing.
Those of you who know Larry Bell and John Mallett will confirm that, whenever you bumped into them at brewers’ conventions, the two would report on their latest construction work. This has been necessitated by the brewery’s rapid growth. Bell’s Brewery was founded in 1983 as a home-brewing supply shop in Kalamazoo. The company has grown from 160 hl in 1986 to 210,000 hl in 2011, ranking 7th on the U.S. craft breweries list. For this year, Bell’s Brewery forecasts sales of over 230,000 hl.
In May 2012, they officially opened their new 230 hl brewhouse at the Comstock facility, the plant Mr Bell built in 2001. By our count, this is the fourth brewhouse that Mr Bell has built. The new equipment gives Bell’s Brewery a brewing capacity of about 800,000 hl and is part of a USD 20 million (EUR 16 million) expansion scheme that includes an expanded grain handling system, 14 new fermentation vessels, an energy storage system plus the aforementioned wooden fermenters.
A few million dollars also went into renovating the Eccentric Cafe in downtown Kalamazoo, the site of Mr Bell’s first brewery, where they continue to brew smaller brands.
It’s an amazing feat that Bell’s Brewery, despite its size, has remained loyal to seasonal brews. Although it brews eight brands all year round, one of its 16 seasonals, the brand Oberon, is one of their major sellers.
Defying craft brewing dogma, Mr Bell and Mr Mallett are planning to next put in a canning line. Their consumers in Michigan are into the Great Outdoors and would prefer to carry cans rather than bottles of their favourite beer around with them. Craft beer out of cans may rankle with some of the more orthodox craft brewers but the bigger ones like Sierra Nevada and Boulevard Brewing as well as some of the newer ones see no reason as to why not.
Bell’s other investment projects, which were part of a USD 52 million expansion, announced in 2010 during the company’s 25th anniversary, have been put on hold as the company tries to save money in an attempt to buy out 11 of the 14 shareholders, it was reported.
As early as this autumn, a decision to sell the brewery could be made depending on the outcome of ongoing negotiations with several minority shareholders, Mr Bell was reported as saying.
Mr Bell, 53, and his two children, Laura and David, own the majority of the company’s shares. Mr Bell would like to pass the company on to his children. But to do so, he will need to buy out the other shareholders and turn Bell’s brewery into basically a family business. Should the remaining shareholders refuse to sell and the current ownership structure prevail, his children would have to sell the brewery upon his death, Mr Bell said.
“I don’t want to sell, but it’s a great time to sell if I had to. There are many willing buyers”, Mr Bell told local media in April 2012.
Many in Michigan hope that it will not come to this.
