Before Bell’s was Bell’s, it was the Kalamazoo Brewing Supply Company—a homebrew shop that opened in 1983. It remained a homebrew shop even after Larry Bell, about two years later, began selling the amber ale he brewed on his 15-gallon kit.
That shop is where local homebrewers met, too. There was a club there called the Beer Mussels (a name that Bell blames on too much homebrew). Among that group, Bell says, “there were a bunch of guys who were making cherry stout.”
Most of the country’s tart Montmorency cherries come from western Michigan—and those homebrewers were taking full advantage. “You know, we live in the Fruit Belt here. So, I thought, kind of to honor them and do something different, that we’d make Cherry Stout.”