Grand Rapids, Michigan: Where Calvinism Met Craft Beer and Everybody Agreed to Be Polite About It

Grand Rapids is a city of roughly 200,000 people sitting on the Grand River in West Michigan. It has a nickname for every decade and a brewery for every nickname. If you're planning a trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, here's what you're in for: great beer, strange art, and a lot of last names that start with "Van."

Beer City USA: A Guilt-Management Program With Hazy IPAs

Let's start with the liquid in the room. Grand Rapids has been known as Beer City USA since 2012, and USA Today crowned it America's Best Beer City in 2022 and 2023. That's a remarkable run for a town that, per the local tourism board, went from almost no breweries in 1996 to national beer royalty in a couple of decades.

The roasters at RoastMyTown noticed the irony. This is a city shaped by Dutch Reformed theology, and now it has a Beer City Ale Trail guide to the area's 35+ craft breweries. (Counts vary wildly depending on whether you include distilleries, cideries, and the surrounding area. Michigan's tourism site says more than 80 breweries.) Whatever the number, Founders Brewing Co. is a major US craft brewery and the defining Grand Rapids beer institution. Meanwhile, Brewery Vivant makes Belgian-inspired farmhouse ales inside a converted funeral home. Yes, you can drink a saison where they used to hold wakes. It's the most Grand Rapids sentence ever written: solemn building, joyful beverage, everyone behaves.

ArtPrize: Democracy's Weirdest Experiment

Every fall, downtown Grand Rapids becomes a free, open-air art free-for-all. Anyone over 18 can display art, any space in the three-square-mile district can be a venue, and there are typically well over 100 venues, including laundromats and auto body shops. Yes, you may find a masterpiece next to the dryers. Fluff-and-fold, but make it avant-garde.

The next edition is coming up this fall, which means that if you're reading this after it ends, you missed it. Put it on the calendar for next year.

The roast's complaint stands, though: the public votes on a cash prize, so the finest artistic minds of the Midwest are judged by the same electorate that reviews Applebee's. To be fair, the organizers added a juried award too, because even Grand Rapids knows when a group chat shouldn't have the final word.

If you'd rather see art that's staying put, there's the cherry-red La Grande Vitesse by Alexander Calder, the city's beloved downtown landmark. Locals just call it "The Calder," like a roommate who never pays rent. It exists partly thanks to a local hometown hero: Gerald Ford assisted in getting National Endowment for the Arts funding for this project, the first such use of these funds for a public sculpture project. Presidential influence, deployed for abstract steel. Beautiful.

From Furniture City to Tote Bag Capital

Before the beer, there were the chairs. Furniture manufacturing grew to employ a large share of Grand Rapids residents, and by 1876, when Grand Rapids-made furniture appeared at an exposition in Philadelphia, the name gained national recognition as a marker of quality. The industry thrived thanks to skilled artisans, many of them immigrants from the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland.

Then the hardwood forests ran out, and the industry had to adapt. But the pivot wasn't a total loss. Local companies including Steelcase, Haworth and Herman Miller still shape the future of the global workplace, which is a polite way of saying the chair that Gary in accounting complains about probably has Grand Rapids DNA. There's even a monument to the glory days: the Waters Building, a historic furniture-era landmark. A building the size of a feelings-filled mattress showroom, but for pride.

Today, Corewell Health, Meijer, and Steelcase are notable businesses within the region. Meijer, the Michigan-born superstore, is practically a civic religion here. Nothing says "Dutch Calvinist rebellion" like buying a kayak and a rotisserie chicken at 11 p.m. on a Sunday.

If You Ain't Dutch: The Family Reunion With a Zoning Board

The local saying goes "If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much," which is a bold statement from a city whose most famous native son isn't Dutch. President Gerald Ford grew up here, and he is buried with his wife Betty on the grounds of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in the city. Even the airport carries his name.

As for the family names around town, the Van Andels and the DeVoses built generational fortunes, and their names are on the research institute, the children's hospital, the arena, and the convention center. You will, at some point, sit in a venue named after one of them while sipping beer brewed by someone else with a Van in their name. It's less a city than a very polite family reunion.

Still, the polite part is real. The city's brewers are famously friendly with one another, a collegial bunch with a history of supporting each other. Even the competition here is neighborly.

A few more things worth your time:

• Heritage Hill Historic District: One of the nation's largest urban historic districts, with over 1,300 preserved Victorian and Prairie-style homes, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Meyer May House.
• Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park: a premier garden and art destination.

The Verdict

Grand Rapids is the second-most populated city in Michigan, with a metro area of about 1.1 million people, and it earns every bit of its reinvention story. It's a place where old furniture money, new beer money, and a deep streak of civic politeness have somehow produced a genuinely great weekend trip. Bring a designated driver and a healthy tolerance for the letter "V."

Think we were too nice? See the full roast on RoastMyTown.com.