Bell’s Brewery was founded in 1983 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and has been brewing its own beers since 1985. In 2003, Bell’s opened the Comstock brewery a few miles east of Kalamazoo. The company’s beer production was taken to a whole new level in 2012 with the launch of a brand-new 200-barrel brewhouse: Together with the existing 50-barrel brewhouse, it enabled production to grow from 180,000 to half a million barrels per year. Bell’s currently brews eight beers for year-round distribution, as well as a range of seasonal and specialty beers. The company is now among the top ten largest independent, family-owned craft brewing companies in the country.
During a brewhouse expansion in Comstock in 2012, Bell’s Brewery decided to go with brewmaxx, a process control system specially developed by ProLeiT to meet the needs of breweries when automating, controlling and documenting their plant processes. Bell’s was so impressed with the new control system, that ProLeiT was subsequently commissioned to move the existing older brewhouse, the tank cooling system and the yeast propagation system over to the new control system. A third ‘pilot brewhouse’ (with a capacity of 15 barrels), set up to test new beers, was also implemented by ProLeiT in 2018.