From a Bellaire hardware store to a brewery that fills Elk Rapids

Joe Short was 22 when he registered a brewery with the state in 2002, having taught himself to brew at 19 in his mother’s place down in Rapid City. To open a pub he took the long-empty Bellaire hardware store — a century-old building on Bridge Street — and refit it as a brewpub. It opened April 26, 2004, with a small seven-barrel system squeezed into the back, and it caught on so fast that the hardware store couldn’t keep up with the thirst.

So the beer-making moved one town over. In January 2008 Short’s bought an old manufacturing building in Elk Rapids, and a year later the first big batches came out of it. That split is the key to the whole operation: the Bellaire pub stayed a pub, a quirky, packed place for live music and a pint, while the real volume — tens of thousands of barrels a year — flowed out of the Elk Rapids plant on Grand Traverse Bay.

What put Short’s on the map wasn’t a flagship lager but a refusal to color inside the lines. Joe Short brewed beers that tasted like key lime pie, like bloody marys, like black licorice, and gave them names to match. Some were one-off experiments, some became cult favorites, and together they built a reputation for a brewery that would try anything once. For a long stretch the beer was sold only in Michigan — you couldn’t get it out of state, which made a Short’s can something visitors hauled home like a souvenir.

The two-town setup still holds. Drive into Bellaire and the old hardware store is the busiest corner in the village; drive to Elk Rapids and a former factory hums away making the stuff. Not bad for a teenager’s home-brew habit that got badly out of hand.