Modest worker houses and corner stores line the west side neighborhood of Grand Rapids you have entered, ground zero for the city's extraordinary craft brewing scene. Vivant Beer Company, which opened in 2012 in a former funeral home on Bridge Street, specializes in Belgian-inspired ales — farmhouse saisons, abbey-style ales, sour beers fermented with wild yeast — brewed with the kind of precision and patience that Belgian monks developed over centuries. The west side was historically the neighborhood of Grand Rapids' immigrant Catholic working class: Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Dutch Catholics who settled here near the factories and the parish churches that were the center of their social world.
Today those same streets are home to a concentration of craft breweries, specialty coffee shops, and restaurants that have transformed the district without entirely replacing its character — the churches are still here, the bungalows are still here, the corner stores are still here, now alongside the taprooms and the wine bars. The west side is what happens when a working-class immigrant neighborhood gets good beer.