Michigan Breweries, Bars, Eateries (2025)

If you've spent much time visiting the Kalamazoo area, this will likely sadden you. It was announced today on the local evening TV news that The Kalamazoo Beer Exchange is closing this weekend. It was a fun place to visit, although I haven't been there in a couple years.

For those who aren't aware about how the place operates, they get the 'Exchange' part of their name by pricing their beers based upon what beers are in demand or not in demand, and the prices are adjusted accordingly. They usually had a pretty good taplist, so it was worth going there with the hope you'd get a good price on a great beer.

If I lived a little closer, and if snowy weather wasn't a threat, I'd probably visit the place for one last memory.

 

This is a cross-post from the 'How is your local brewery doing?' in the Beer Talk forum:

Depending on how you want to define 'local' breweries (an entire state?), this is interesting (and surprising to me).

I downloaded a list of supposedly active Michigan breweries in July, 2024. That list had 452 breweries listed. Over time I would add newly-opened breweries and mark any brewery as 'Closed' whenever I heard about them thru the BA forums. If a brewery is listed as closed, it remains on the list rather than being deleted. Today that list has grown to 501 breweries, thus 49 new openings between July, 2024 and December, 2025. That's 10.8% growth in roughly 18 months.

Earlier in this thread I replied that the 6 breweries that are more local to me seem to be holding their own. I discovered that I had saved a copy of the list in early November of 2025 so I counted the number of listings that showed 'Closed' and came up with 44. That's 9.7% of the original list. All of these closings would have been noted by me from this forum, social media, etc.

So I got further curious about how the entire state is doing, so I reconciled my list against the BA database. Now there are 66 breweries listed as closed. I may have caused a few of these closings to be listed on BA, but the majority of the 22 closings since early November have come from other sources. There's no way for me to know whether these 22 closures actually happened during the last 50-60 days without doing a lot of research (and I'm not that curious). But the numbers mean that potentially 4.4% of Michigan's breweries closed in that 50-60 day period, and that's not good. So things may be worse than I thought if 'local' goes beyond my local area.

 

I couldn't agree more. I can put up with some marginal service, but the quality of the beer is key to me.

I looked back at which breweries were listed as closed on my list, and I've been to only 3-4 of the 2025 closings. I didn't have any exceptional beers at any of them, so no great loss to me. It's sad because of the loss of jobs whenever any brewery closes, even for the owner(s), but everyone has to learn from the experience.