"Beer City, USA" Is in Michigan — and the Best Beer in America Has a Fish on the Label

Here’s one to settle a bar argument: Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been crowned “Beer City, USA.” Back in 2012, in a national online poll created by homebrewing pioneer Charlie Papazian, Grand Rapids tied Asheville, North Carolina. The next year, Grand Rapids won outright in a landslide — and the poll was retired afterward, so locals like to joke that makes them Beer City forever.

How did a town once known as “Furniture Capital of the World” become a beer mecca? A lot of credit goes to Founders Brewing Company, which opened in 1997, nearly went bankrupt, and then helped ignite a whole craft-beer culture. Today the greater Grand Rapids area has more than 35 breweries, and you can collect stamps on a “Beer City Ale Trail.”

But Michigan’s beer story stretches statewide. Down in Kalamazoo, Larry Bell started Bell’s Brewery as a homebrew supply shop in 1983 and sold his first beer in 1985 — it’s the oldest craft brewery in Michigan. And Bell’s flagship, Two Hearted Ale (named for a trout river in the U.P. and stamped with a trout on the label), was voted the Best Beer in America by the American Homebrewers Association’s Zymurgy magazine for four straight years, 2017 through 2020 — finally dethroning Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, which had topped the list for seven years running.