Grand Rapids, Michigan
Today, I want to talk about a city that not too many people know of: Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.
As most of you know, I travel a lot, and at most places I go, there is usually a few breweries to visit. Well, actually, I take a lot of trips for the specific reason that there is a brewery or other craft beer related thing that I want to see.In the spring of 2017, I was fiddling around on Skyscanner, trying to figure out where my next trip was going to go. I considered New York, again, Seattle, Texas and a bunch of other places but I couldn’t find any flights that I thought were the right price. While I was staring at Seattle on a map, I noticed that Vancouver was right above it. This gave me an idea: What if I included Canada in the trip? I could do Vancouver-Seattle-Portland and then come back up to Vancouver.
Unfortunately, flights to Vancouver were also out of my price range, so I switched my attention to the East Coast of Canada. Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa are all relatively close to each other. I looked for flights to Toronto and, to my surprise, found return flights, direct from Dublin, for 380 Dollars. Those were the cheapest transatlantic flights I’d ever gotten my hands on so I booked right away and started thinking about an itinerary. I thought about doing a tour of the cities of Canada’s East. It looked interesting, but there was no real obvious way of getting back to Toronto, other than basically coming back down the same way I had gone up.
Then, I saw a different option. I’ve always been fascinated by the Great Lakes. These huge lakes, more inland seas, really, were something I always wanted to see. So if I started out from Toronto, which is on the shore of Lake Ontario, I could then make my way to Detroit, another city that I’d always wanted to visit, and make my way around Lake Eerie via Cleveland, Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and then back to Toronto. This would give me 2 of the 5 Great Lakes in one trip and 5 cities that I’d never been to. Good plan.
And then I noticed the name Grand Rapids on the map, really close to Detroit. Or so I thought.
Grand Rapids does not hold much of interest for most people, but if you're a beer fanatic like me, it is a city of great interest. Grand Rapids has about 80 breweries, which is quite amazing for a city with a population of just over a million. Grand Rapids had to be part of my trip.
Toronto is often described as “New York run by Germans” or “New York run by the Swiss” but I would describe it as “New York with the brakes on”. Calling it “New York run by the Swiss” to me makes it sound as if it’s a dull place, which it absolutely isn’t.
(Disclaimer here: I have never been to Switzerland myself, but every time I spoke to Swiss people, or had to interact with them professionally, I always sensed and heard a distinct lack of joy. This is not to say that they do nothing but work and then count their money, but the only description of a pub crawl in Switzerland that I could find anywhere was an article written by a blogger about a crawl in Lausanne that included just 4 bars, 2 of those were hotel bars and one of those was in the hotel she was staying in. I worked as the liaison for Switzerland for an American company and I never found anyone being interested in small talk. They methodically did what they had to do and then put down the phone. I’m not saying there isn’t any fun to be had in Switzerland, but I sure can’t find it)
Detroit on the other hand, gets a bit of a bad rep as a city of urban decay, rampant crime, and a text book example of how to run a prosperous city into the ground. I will concede immediately that Detroit is a city that could do with a lick of paint and maybe a bit of road work here and there, but it is nowhere near as bad as people will want to make you believe.
I’ll get into more detail about Toronto and Detroit some other time because today I wanted to specifically talk about Grand Rapids and the Founders brewery. After 4 days in Toronto, I took a Greyhound bus to Detroit, where I just happened to walk into the Batch Brewing Company when I took a wrong turn on my way to the casino. After 2 days in Detroit I boarded another Greyhound bus, this time to Grand Rapids.
You don’t really appreciate how vast the USA is until you try to cross it overland. You have the idea that it’s big- the flight from Boston to San Diego takes 6 hours, the same time it takes to fly from Dublin to New York, but that’s in the air. A few years ago, I traveled overland from Boston to New York (3 ½ hours on the bus) then to Phildadelpia (3 ½ hours) and then to Washington DC (another 3 hours). That’s a total of 10 hours on the bus, and if you blow up Google Maps to fill the screen of your laptop with a map of the contiguous United States, that’s a distance of less than 2 inches. This is a big country.
Pictured: Big Country. To give you a bit of an idea: Texas, that yellow blob at the bottom, is the size of France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland combined. Alaska, in the inset, is more than twice as big again.
I realized this again now as I sat on the bus to Grand Rapids. The bus took over 5 hours to get there. In Ireland, I can get to anywhere from Dublin within 5 hours with the exception, maybe, of the furthest reaches of West Kerry and the Northern shores of Donegal. Look at the map of the USA and you see that in those same 5 hours you just cut across the Southern corner of one state and it isn’t even one of the bigger ones. The USA is a big country.
I got off the bus in 30+ degree heat (the American Mid-West gets very steamy in summer and early autumn) hauled my backpack on my back and set off for my AirB&B. I normally stay in hostels but as Grand Rapids isn’t really a spot on the tourist trail, there weren’t any and as I also didn’t fancy paying 150 Dollars for a room where I was only going to put my drunk head down for 4 or 5 hours, I opted for AirB&B and for 35 Dollars I had a nice room in the house of an African American lady. She gave me the key to the backdoor and told me that there was no curfew if I just tried to be quiet should I come home very late.
She also advised me to download the Uber app to get around as it was cheap and easy. This was another first for me so I downloaded the app and within 3 minutes a car pulled up in front of the house, which took me to the reason for my visit to Grand Rapids: the Founders Brewery.
Founders has always been one of my favorite craft breweries. They make amazing beer in every flavor imaginable and I tried dozens of them.
Founders have gotten a bit of bad press in the craft beer world recently. First, they announced that the brewery had been sold to Spanish macro lager giant Mahou, who produce a number of middle-of-the-road lagers, the most famous of which is San Miguel. This may not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, they still make the same beer to the same recipes in the same brewery, but to craft beer militants like me, this is a cardinal sin. Independence is very important to a lot of craft beer enthusiasts, and selling the shop to a giant producer of flavorless lager is not done (See also: Beavertown)
The second matter was that they are the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, in which an ex-employee accused some colleagues of racial abuse which, ofcourse, is a very grave allegation. As far as I’m aware, there is no outcome to this case just yet.
When I was there, however, none of this was on the cards, and I had a great time there.
I arrived at the brewery and walked into the taproom. It was Huge. There were 3 different bars, a stage for live music, a deli and pizza counter, pool tables, and a souvenir shop that is bigger than my local pub here in Dublin. As I was tired and sweaty from the bus trip and the weather, I decided to sit down at the bar closest bar to the entrance, which was directly to the right.
I sat down, ordered a beer from the girl behind the bar and enjoyed it immensely. I then noticed a big door to the keg room that was full of brewery stickers from all over the world. I took a Galway Bay Brewery sticker from my pocket and asked her if she wanted one for the door.
She looked at it and said
“Galway. Where is that?”
- In Ireland.
“Wow, that’s a long way away. Do you live in Galway?”
- No, I live in Dublin, on the other side of Ireland.
“What are you doing in Grand Rapids?”
-Visiting the Founders Brewery.
“Yeah, I see that, but why are you in Grand Rapids”
-No, that’s the only reason I’m here: this brewery.
“Wait a minute.. You came all the way from Ireland to Grand Rapids, just to visit Founders?”
-Yes.
“So you traveled all this way..”
- Yes, all 3674 miles of it.
“Wow, I’m impressed. Your next beer is on me”
-That is very kind of you.
While I enjoyed my free beer, a girl in a Founders t-shirt came out of the t-shirt shop, sat down 2 stools away from me and started a story about something that had happened earlier in the day. It then dawned on me that there were a lot of people in Founders gear sitting there, and that this was where they sat down for a beer after work, before going home.
The girl behind the bar, who had given me the free beer, then said to the girl from the t-shirt shop:
“Do you see Lenny here?”
-Yes. Hi Lenny.
“He came all the way from Ireland to Grand Rapids just to visit Founders!”
-Really?
“Yes really”
- Wow, your next beer is on me!
And so it went. Every time someone came out of the shop, the kitchen or the brewery and sat down at the bar, someone would point to me and tell the story of the lunatic who travelled halfway around the world to visit a brewery.
I was treated to every beer on offer. One guy asked me if I liked KBS. (KBS is an Imperial coffee stout, aged in Bourbon Barrels with 12% alcohol and a much sought after beer). I told him I love KBS and off he went to one of the other bars, only to return a few minutes later with 2 goblets of this magnificent beer. I was given beers that are only sold at the brewery and nowhere else. They treated me to beers I can’t remember the name of, of which only one cask was ever made. Brewery specials that only came on sale on one Friday a month (It was Thursday).
I had one of the best nights of my life, and I’ve had some pretty epic nights in my time.
When closing time came, at around 2AM, I was happily drunk, very drunk, but still there. I asked for the bill.
“Can I pay please?”
- Sure, hold on.
“No rush”.
- Yeah, so that’ll be 9 Dollars.
“Oh come on! That can’t be right”
- Everyone bought you beers. The only thing on here is a bowl of chili and a Centennial.
I gave them all the cash I had in my wallet, which was somewhere around 35 Dollars and insisted they put the rest in the tip jar. After some discussion, they finally accepted, I said my goodbyes and went back to my AirB&B.
After a fantastic night’s sleep, I woke up at around 9.
I walked downstairs but the house was deserted. I took a shower, gathered my things, left the key on the kitchen table and went back to central Grand Rapids.
The fresh air did me good, and after some 10 minutes, I started to realize that Grand Rapids is full of those cute wooden houses that you always see in movies that aren’t set in New York or Los Angeles. I took a number of photos of them, something I hadn’t been able to do the previous night as this was the exact day that my power bank decided to give up and I needed to save my phone battery to call an Uber back to my lodgings.
My bus to Detroit did not leave until 13.30 and as Founders opens at 11, I decided to have breakfast there and maybe have some more beers to dull my senses for the boring 5 hour trek back to Detroit. I sat at the bar with my sandwich and my first beer of the day, reading a book, when I heard a voice saying:
“Hey, you’re that guy from Ireland, aren’t you?”
- Yes, that’s me
“Hold on a second”.
He shuffled off and 2 or 3 minutes later came back holding a tray with 4 taster glasses on it.
“New brews, straight from the brewery. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting us”.
More free beer. These were the nicest people I had ever met. I spent another 2 hours at the bar, tasting beers and talking to staff, until finally the time came for me to leave. As I was waiting for the bill, one of the girls from the souvenir shop came up to me and handed me a paper bag. “Here’s a souvenir” she said. “And thank you for visiting Founders”.
The bag contained stickers, a few badges, a bottle opener/key chain and some other knick knacks. After I paid for my breakfast, I went to the souvenir shop and finally managed to spend some money by buying a tshirt and some cans of beer for the bus ride.
Happy about being treated so nicely by people who had never seen me before, I walked across the street and got on the bus. Back to Detroit. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it back to Grand Rapids, but if I do, I know where my first stop will be. And even if I don’t make it back, that day will be a memory I will cherish forever.
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