Check Before You Walk Over: The Beer Map Has Changed

Grand Rapids has spent more than a decade collecting reader-poll titles for its beer, and a great many of the articles describing that scene were written before the last three years happened. American craft brewing has had a punishing stretch, and this city has lost real institutions to it.

What has closed, as of September 2026:

Grand Rapids Brewing Company closed permanently after a kitchen fire in April 2024. Elk Brewing has closed. The Creston taproom, latterly operated by Saugatuck Brewing, shut in March 2025 as part of a wider retrenchment. Atwater's Grand Rapids taproom closed in July 2026, when the brand was sold without that location. Broad Leaf's Westside site closed in January 2024, although its Kentwood location continues.

What remains open, and it is still a lot: Founders on Grandville Avenue SW, HopCat on Ionia Avenue, City Built in Monroe North, The Mitten and Harmony Hall on the West Side, Harmony Brewing in Eastown, Vivant in its converted funeral home chapel on Cherry Street, Speciation for wild and sour beer, Broad Leaf in Kentwood, Perrin up in Comstock Park and Rockford Brewing twenty minutes north.

There are still roughly eight breweries inside the downtown walking circuit, which is the reason a Grand Rapids beer weekend works on foot in a way it does not in most American cities of this size.

Two things follow for visitors. First, check a taproom's own page on the morning you plan to go, rather than trusting a list. That is not a legal disclaimer; it is the practical difference between a good evening and a locked door. Second, be sceptical of any article that still lists the closed names above, because it tells you when that article was written.

One perennial correction while we are here. Bell's is in Kalamazoo, fifty miles south. New Holland is in Holland, on the lakeshore. Neither is a Grand Rapids brewery, however often they are described as one.