This is part of Wet February, a series about America’s increasingly muddled relationship with drinking—and how to sip your way through it wisely and well.
When it comes to a modern brewer charting a meteoric rise, it’s hard to think of a better example than Bell’s Brewery.
Bell’s, famous for its Two Hearted IPA and summer-coded Oberon, was founded in 1985 as Kalamazoo Brewing Co. in Michigan. In that first year, it brewed 135 barrels. Today, it brews nearly 500,000 barrels annually. A barrel is roughly 31 gallons, or about two kegs’ worth of beer. So the brewery’s production went from around 270 kegs in 1986 to around 934,000 kegs today.
Something else has happened to Bell’s amid all that growth. In 2021, founder Larry Bell sold the brewery to one of the biggest beverage companies in the world, a huge moment that the average drinker might not have noticed. Sometimes, it seems as if Bell’s wants it that way, especially if the company saw any outraged forums for beer fans during and after the sale. What’s happened with the beloved brewery over the past few years tells a deeper story about where craft beer in America has arrived—and why fans of once-small beers have a hard time letting go.
Craft beer has succeeded in its mission of becoming ubiquitous, if not entirely mainstream. In 2004, there were 1,468 breweries in America, according to the Brewers Association. In 2014, there were 4,014. In 2024, there were 9,922. But after a period of great growth comes a growth plateau. This plateau is where we find ourselves in 2026. In the current moment, finding new growth has been challenging, and many brewers find that the market, brewery input costs rising, and customer behavior are increasingly difficult to navigate. The beer market today is a mixed bag: Though we still have more breweries than we ever have, 2025 is the second consecutive year where closings outpaced openings.
Into these perilous conditions comes a big craft brewery like Bell’s, which had already achieved rare scale and success even while it retained the sheen of a homespun beer. According to Jeff Alworth, an Oregon writer who authored The Beer Bible and The Secrets of Master Brewers, Bell’s was a brand associated with feverish excitement, especially for those with ties to the Mitten State. “What I can say is that at least 20 years ago, people who moved to Oregon from Michigan treated Bell’s like a sacred liquid,” he said. “When you asked people about the beer, they emphasized its cultural salience—it was like bottled Michigan. I’ve never seen anyone treat a brewery the same way.”
Bell’s rose and rose, traveling far beyond Michigan and even America to become one of the most popular and widely available craft brands. Two Hearted became a standard tap at nice restaurants. People hunted down the special-release Hopslam every year with great intention. People from Michigan cheered on its rise, especially if they now lived in a new market where it had become available. Then came the sale.
As the Detroit Free Press head-turningly explained in November 2021, Larry Bell had announced the brewery’s sale to “Australasian beer company Lion, a subsidiary of Japanese beverage conglomerate Kirin, for an undisclosed amount.” Put more accurately, Kirin made Bell’s Brewery Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary, itself absorbed by and merged with New Belgium Brewing Company, Inc.—also owned by Kirin—in 2023. A Russian nesting doll of ownerships, if you will.
When the sale was announced in 2021, message boards lit up with angry Bell’s customers and craft fans. They said the sale could make the quality drop, that it was against the hometown Michigan spirit of the brewery, and that it would help Big Beer swallow and wipe out more of the little independents. They said they were through with Bell’s, and predicted potential ruin. As one popular, representative comment on the r/beer subreddit put it after the sale, “Fuck.”
People were certainly pissed off that Bell’s was no longer owned by Larry Bell. There was a reputational hit. But news broke in 2021 that Bell’s would be sold. It seems today that many customers don’t know about Bell’s corporate ownership. Does that matter? It depends on who you ask.
Dave Infante, a James Beard Award–winning journalist who covers the food and drink industries in the newsletter Fingers, told me that drinkers have demonstrated pretty convincingly that they are not as concerned about independence as they used to be. He also works as a contributing editor and columnist at VinePair, where he publishes the weekly beer-industry column Hop Take. “There’s a much broader availability of craft beer than there was a decade ago,” he said, “and the conversations about provenance and independence that used to dominate the discourse around craft beer have fallen by the wayside as a result. People, I think, to some extent have become tired of them, within the industry and then certainly in the broader American drinking public.”
But according to Circana, an American market research company, sales of Bell’s Two Hearted are indeed down. The report from December 2025 showed the top 30 “craft” brands of that year to date to be full of corporate ownership from the world’s biggest brewer: AB InBev. Elysian Space Dust—owned by AB InBev—was up 7.3 percent in dollar sales off-premise. Wicked Weed’s Pernicious, another AB InBev–owned IPA brand, was up 20.7 percent in dollar sales. The same data set cited Bell’s Two Hearted as down 1.9 percent in dollar sales.
If independence was really as significant a buying factor as true believers want it to be, brands owned by AB InBev wouldn’t be doing so well. And Two Hearted may be on the downswing for other reasons. “It’s hard to extend these brands,” Infante said of Bell’s Two Hearted and Oberon’s potential. “It’s hard to find ways to keep them relevant in such a different market than the one they were created for.”
Whatever the case, I still wondered if one of the primary accusations against Bell’s and other craft beers that go big held any water: Was the beer itself actually different now?
Some beer buyers say the beer is different than how they remember it a decade ago. Some say it’s filtered, adding they remembered Bell’s bumper stickers reading: “If God wanted us to filter our beer, he wouldn’t have given us livers.” Bell’s makes the claim on its website that its beers are unpasteurized, though that page is now two years old. When I spoke to over a dozen sources about this, at least one buyer believed Two Hearted and Oberon were filtered, if not pasteurized. He remembered when the brewery made the claim. He cited a commercial, posted online in 2012, in which the brewery showed an accordion player lighting an accordion on fire, à la Jimi Hendrix, and exclaimed, “Bell’s. Live life unfiltered.”
Some brewers acknowledge the company is different, but also argue that Bell’s Two Hearted still delivers on its original value proposition: a hoppy offering with good bitterness and a brisk 7 percent alcohol by volume, the same strength it’s been. It’s still solely brewed with Centennial hops, the variety that it has always been. The beer itself was first released in 1997 as a winter seasonal, and went into year-round production in 2003. By 2013, it became Bell’s best seller, eclipsing Oberon Ale. For many, Two Hearted is the beer that tasted like Michigan in a bottle. For most drinkers, it still does.
That doesn’t mean the vibes aren’t off sometimes. What is important to a massive brewer? Growth. Sales. It’s not that these things aren’t important to a small brewer, but their trajectories are completely different. In the end it seems Bell’s doesn’t make bad beer, it’s just been subjected to bad ideas. Brand extensions like Mango Habañero Oberon rubbed drinkers the wrong way, and some wished that product would sunset. Double Two Hearted, the double IPA introduced in 2015, has given way to Big Hearted IPA, a 9.5 percent boozy, trendy, imperial IPA sold in 19.2 oz. “stovepipe” cans at supermarkets, mini-marts, and gas stations. These and other brand extensions may have lost Bell’s some customer goodwill.
Bell’s declined to speak to me about any of this. But a person who’s been in production with the company for several years told me that any variations within hoppy beers like Two Hearted and Hopslam are due to hop lots. People often forget that beer is an agricultural product. As the saying goes, “no farms, no beer.” Hop lots are massive collections of harvested, dried hops typically processed into pellets after the flowers come off the bine. One year’s lot, say 2025, can be different from the last year’s lot. Perhaps 2024 was throwing lime and zesty grapefruit, whereas 2025 is giving off aromas of earthy, freshly fallen wet leaves and blueberries. That is to say that one year’s lot may be different from the next.
So the scuttlebutt that the beer has changed may just be that. Consider the “king of beers,” Budweiser, which often claims it’s been unchanged since 1876. I have a friend whose grandfather brewed Budweiser in the pre-Prohibition era. She has a notebook of his with dozens of recipes from over half a dozen breweries he worked for from the 1880s to the 1930s. His recipe calls for Bohemian hops. Budweiser is no longer brewed with Bohemian hops, and thus we know it has in fact changed. Does this matter? Not really right now, but it once did.
It’s understandable why fans would resist a local brand like Bell’s exploding and disappearing into corporate machinery like it has, and imagine perceived sensory differences as a result. Or maybe the hops have had a slightly different flavor in recent years. Either way, everyone would do well to remember that in beer, as in life, the only thing permanent is change.
