Motor City Brewing Works

Check the hours before you go, and check them again the week you go. Motor City Brewing Works is Detroit’s oldest operating microbrewery — John Linardos started it on Canfield in 1994, and it marked thirty-one years of brewing this past January — and it is currently in the middle of the most Detroit predicament imaginable.

The brewery ran on the city’s historic thermal steam system. After more than a century, the section of steam line feeding its kettle reached the end of its life, and service was permanently shut off on December 31. That forced a pause: taproom service stopped after February 8 while the owners weighed whether to rework the infrastructure, bring in partners, or find a succession path that respects what the place has been. Beer kept flowing to retailers throughout.

The taproom has since reopened on a reduced summer schedule — Friday through Sunday, with food service listed on their own site as resuming shortly rather than running now. Ghettoblaster, brewed and designed in-house, is still the flagship.

We have been, but years ago — long enough that anything we told you about the room would be a memory rather than a report. In fairness, a visit last month wouldn’t tell you much either, with the place mid-transition. So it stays on the list rather than in our verified column, and we’d rather send you now than write a eulogy later. It’s across the street from Third Man Records, it has been part of the Midtown fabric for three decades, and its future is genuinely unwritten.