Bell's Brewery
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| Location | 8938 Krum Ave Galesburg, Michigan United States |
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| Coordinates | 42°17′02″N 85°27′14″W / 42.284°N 85.454°WCoordinates: 42°17′02″N 85°27′14″W / 42.284°N 85.454°W |
| Opened | 1983 |
| Annual production volume | 310,000 US beer barrels (360,000 hL) in 2014 |
Bell's Brewery, Inc. is a brewing company based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with a second brewery in . Bell's Brewery produces the Bell's brand of beers. Bell's also has a brewpub called the Eccentric Cafe.
Larry Bell incorporated The Kalamazoo Brewing Company, Inc., 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 plastic wrap.
The brewery today consists of two separate brewing facilities, the original Kalamazoo Avenue facility, and the state-of-the-art Krum Avenue brewery, in , which opened in 2003. The Kalamazoo Avenue brewery is adjacent to its pub—Bell's Eccentric Cafe—and a General Store which sells Bell's beer and apparel, as well as homebrewing supplies.
In 1998, Bell's 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; it was formally reincorporated as Bell's Brewery, Inc., in 2006.
Ground was broken in April 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.
In 2015, Citing current use of the word "Innovation" in marketing materials, Bell's filed a federal trademark opposition against Innovation Brewing, located in Sylva, North Carolina.
Later, in 2012 Bells announced plans to open a new sister brewery based in Escanaba, Michigan, called Upper Hand Brewery, which subsequently opened in 2014. In February 2017, Laura Bell was appointed CEO of Bell's Brewery, Inc.; Laura Bell is the daughter of founder Larry Bell.
In 2011, the American Homebrewers Association rated Bell's Brewery's Two Hearted Ale (an India Pale Ale) the second-best beer in the United States. The AHA publishes an annual list of 50 ranking beers in its magazine, Zymurgy. Two Hearted Ale is an India pale ale named for the Two Hearted River in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
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