GRAND RAPIDS, MI — Brewers! Ready your, um, fermenters.

To coincide with a beer history exhibit planned this fall, the Grand Rapids Public Museum is launching an "Iron Chef"-like challenge to determine which Michigan brewery will get to supply the museum with beer during the exhibit's fall run.

“I hope to capture a lot of attention for what Michigan as a whole, and West Michigan is doing brew-wise these days,” said Steve Smith, the “chief beer geek,” in charge of beer purchasing and the beer menu at HopCat in Grand Rapids.

Smith has been collaborating with the museum on organizing the challenge, which is tentatively planned for Friday, October 19 and Saturday the 20th.

Brewers in the area have been prepped with some rules for the challenge, which is designed to showcase as much Michigan-sourced ingredients as possible.

Recipe rules for the challenge include:

Now, for the variable:

The sampling will tentatively take place Friday and Saturday at the Van Andel Museum Canter and the museum will purchase two half barrels of beer from each brewer for the event. Smith said they are hoping to include between 30 and 40 Michigan breweries, but confirmations are still rolling in.

Due to production schedule constraints at larger breweries like Founders and Bell’s, the majority of the brewers in the challenge will be smaller operators who have the scheduling flexibility of a small batch system.

“This will be a nice way to showcase the little guy who is doing cool things,” he said.

The first place winner with the most public votes over the two days of sampling will be asked to reproduce the beer recipe and have it sold on tap (or in bottles or cans if that’s an option) at the museum throughout the entire fall exhibit. The Top 5 finishing breweries will get to participate in a black tie beer dinner at the museum in November.

Hopcat helps Grand Rapids in Beer City voting 6 Gallery: Hopcat helps Grand Rapids in Beer City voting

Smith, who teaches a beer history class at HopCat each summer, said it’s been exciting to watch the second rise of beer brewing in Michigan.

Related: Grand Rapids ranked among Top 25 best beer cities in the world

Brewing began in Grand Rapids as early as 1836 when John Pannell began making beer at the bottom of Prospect Hill, a large, wooded rise located where the Waters Building now stands at Pearl Street and Ottawa Avenue NW.



That beer brewing would begin in Grand Rapids while the city was still just a village on the Grand River bank isn't surprising considering that beer was thought of as a healthy alternative to stagnant, tepid water of the era, said Chris Carron, director of research and interpretation at the museum.

Mark Sellers, who owns HopCat, Stella's Lounge, McFadden's and The Viceroy bars in the downtown Arena District, is rebooting the Grand Rapids Brewing Co. downtown this summer on the ground floor of a Heartside redevelopment project by 616 Lofts owner Derek Coppess.

Related: Revived Grand Rapids Brewing Co. returning to downtown.

The original Grand Rapids Brewing Co. started in 1893 when six local brewers consolidated to form a larger company that could fend-off market encroachment by Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis, Mo., which figured out how to distribute their beer in refrigerated cars and expand their national footprint around 1880.

The company built a large Rhineland-style castle brewery (repurposed after Prohibition by Chicago-based Peter Fox Brewing Company) that stood until the 1960s at Michigan Street and Ottawa Avenue NW, where the State of Michigan office building is located today.

Related: Historian: Grand Rapidians embraced both sides of Prohibition

The museum has been busy gathering brewing related materials already in their collections, as well as seeking private collections and modern pieces from local breweries like Founders, Schmohz, HopCat, Harmony, Hideout and others.

The exhibit is planned for location in the Lacks Gallery at the Van Andel Museum Center facility on the west bank of the Grand River.

Email Garret Ellison or follow him on Twitter.