The pandemic undoubtedly impacted businesses across the state and country, and Biére de Mac Brew Works in Mackinac City took the challenges faced as an opportunity to adapt.

For some Michigan breweries, it feels like they just keep taking hits — multiple rounds of shutdowns, limited indoor dining rules, supply chain issues, and for many, extreme labor shortages, have made it more and more difficult to stay in business. The breweries that have been able to change and pivot their models over the last two years are the ones that not only continue to thrive but have almost found a new lease on life, often creating an entirely new plan like Biére de Mac Brew Works, which recently changed their whole food program, while maintaining the continued high quality of their beer and service. 

Bière de Mac Brew Works has been open since 2017 and is owned by the Ranville family.

“COVID kind of realigned us to what we got into the business for,” Danny Ranville explained. “It was beer first, but when you have the caliber of a chef like Edgar (Jacobs), and the knowledge and what he brings to the table, in a startup business everyone brings what they can. He brought his menu and just crushed it. We made waves in the industry not by our beer, but by our food.”

Biére de Mac is co-owned by Danny, and his dad George Ranville. 

Originally the brewery offered a full, from-scratch kitchen, offering things like gooey-loaded mac and cheese, crunchy nachos with pulled pork, and some stellar dirty potato chips that came loaded with bacon, chicken and blue cheese. Their burgers were the stuff of dreams, made with a proprietary blend of beef, and topped with creative toppings. I’ll fully admit to being a huge fan of their mushroom burger, a two-handed umami bomb that came smothered in savory Gruyere cheese, so when I heard that the kitchen had to close due to staff shortages, I was understandably upset. 

I needn’t have worried.

“We loved our food, but the problem with our food was that the stuff was so good,” Danny said.

Running a full kitchen isn’t easy in the best of times, and the changing face of the restaurant industry over the last two years, especially in a seasonal spot like Northern Michigan, has made it even harder. Pivoting to new concepts is the only way many places might survive, and that is just what the brewery has been doing. 

After Chef Jacobs moved on from Biére de Mac in early 2020, the brewery then turned to a rotating cast of food trucks to feed their guests. Extreme staff shortages made running a scratch kitchen impossible, and while that situation hasn’t changed for practically every restaurant, Biére de Mac has come up with what they hope is now a more permanent solution. 

They’ve changed up the menu at Bière de Mac, and now serve freshly baked pizzas with creative toppings.

Biére de Mac has partnered with Smelted Wood Fired Pizza out of Marquette to provide a new dining experience, one that involves frozen pizzas. These aren’t your supermarket Tombstones, however. These little beauties get handmade, frozen, wrapped, and sent by truck to customers throughout the Upper Peninsula, and now in the Lower Peninsula as well.

“We’re their first account south of the bridge,” said Danny. “They are trying to move south, and we are kind of their guinea pigs.”

Smelted had been operating a food truck that served freshly made pizzas, pulling up outside of local breweries like Blackrocks and Ore Dock.

Bière de Mac partners with Marquette based Smelted Pizza Company for the new pizzas on the menu. 

“The pandemic made us change a few things around and we really started our frozen pizzas in 2020,” said Smelted Pizza’s manager, McKenzie DesJardins. “As there is a shortage of employees right now, we are making it easier for restaurants and bars to offer food without needing the labor and the people to make the food.”

In addition to their new customer Biére de Mac, Smelted also supplies frozen pizzas to “three different grocery stores in Marquette and Negaunee, and a variety of local corner stores in Marquette. We also sell to Breakers Roadhouse Bar and Barrel and Beam Brewery,” DesJardins said.  

“We were tickled about it,” said Danny about getting to work with Smelted. “We are still having problems getting staff. Staffing was hard before COVID, because of the seasonality. This just seemed like a really good solution.”

Biére de Mac took their first pizza delivery the second week of November, with a test run of about 200 pizzas. They sold them all in two weeks, during one of the brewery’s slowest times of the year.

Bière de Mac offers colorful ceramic growlers to fill with their award winning beer.

“This is a great time for both of us, during the off-season, to kind of work out the kinks, and figure out the logistics,” said Danny. “See what works, and what doesn’t. And if it goes well, and so far it has, then maybe this is the direction we go.”

A new brick-lined oven was purchased, and not only can it cook a whole mess of pizzas at a time, but it can also have them crispy, bubbly, hot and ready in just four minutes. 

“It’s all about the oven,” Danny said.

The brewery has retained all of their original kitchen equipment, so if the situation changes and they want to go back to the full scratch menu, they can. 

At first, Danny was unsure of the value of purchasing these locally made pizzas, versus just purchasing frozen pies from a food distributor, which to be frank, cost way less than the ones from Smelted. He changed his mind pretty quickly, after sampling the high-quality pies that they are producing. Smelted will also custom make any kind of pie that Biére de Mac might want, which is an important personal touch for the brewery.

“The pizzas are solid,” Danny said. “They are really good.”

Another great benefit of working with Smelted is that they provide everything that the brewery needs to serve the pizzas, from the boxes to serve them in, down to the packets of red pepper flakes to enhance your pizza with a little heat. For a place that is down to just a few employees, this “plug and play” model for a restaurant has been a lifesaver.

“I love this,” said Danny. “Now, for inventory, I just count pizzas. When we were from scratch, everything had to be weighed out by the ounce, counted out for inventory. This is a lot easier.”

“We’re not trying to win pizza of the year,” Danny continued. “But we want to still have a reputation for good food. The quality has to be there. That’s important. So we’ll see how this goes.”

Bière de Mac is located in Mackinac City and is open year round.

Danny is especially excited to see how the pizzas will change up service during the incredibly busy summer months. Biére de Mac recently excavated a huge swath of land behind their building, creating a pretty massive back lawn that is scattered with picnic tables, chairs, and fire pits during the season. I have no idea how many people could fit back there, but let's just say a lot. Trying to feed that many people would be challenging for the best kitchen, and impossible for one that is short-staffed. With the new partnership with Smelted, Danny said he is hopeful that guests can “be outside, drinking beers, and I can get you some food real quick. It’ll just be a better fit for the seasonality. We can get the pizzas out to the masses when they want to be served quickly.”

The brewery, which opened in 2017, is located in Mackinaw City, with views out the back of the beautiful Mackinac Bridge. Owned by the Danny family, the brewery is one of the only spots in the area that stays open year-round. There is a long history for the Danny family here in the Straights area, as their ancestors joined fur trappers, French explorers, and traders in settling the area hundreds of years ago. The French spelling of Biére de Mac is a nod to this heritage.

One of the most popular brews at Bière de Mac is their Fleur de Mac, a beer they made in collaboration with Mackinac State Historic Parks.

Bière de Mac offers a full line up of beers year round. 

Co-owner Danny Ranville behind the bar at Bière de Mac Brew Works in Mackinac City.

Bière de Mac is open year round, and while the summer months are incredibly busy, a quiet calm reigns during the winter season. 

The tap room at Bière de Mac is open, airy, lined with windows and dotted with aging barrels.

Farmhouse-style ales are the jam here, but not the only style on tap. Nous L’aimons is a French Biere de Garde style amber ale with deep notes of raisin and apricot, and just a hint of peppercorn. Jacob’s Farmhouse Ale gets a dose of hops from the Alsace region of France for notes of grassy herbs and citrus, while the lower alcohol Second Beach is brewed in the Grisette style, with a hint of wheat in the grain bill. One of their most popular beers is the summertime favorite Blueberry Wheat, a crisp pale ale with just a bit of fruit. I’m intrigued by the BDM Brut IPA, a dry, light beer with a grapefruit aroma on the nose, and all the IPA love in the mouth.

My personal favorite, not just for taste, but for the lovely story that accompanies it, is their Fleur de Mac, a partnership between the brewery and the Mackinac State Historic Parks.  Originally brewed in the summer of 2020 to help celebrate the 125 birthday of the parks, Fleur is a Biere de Garde style ale that brewer Matt Peters did a lot of research on before brewing. He studied traditional, historical styles of this beer before coming up with his version, a golden-colored ale with a big mouthfeel, and notes of banana that are perfectly balanced with a bit of hop bitterness. A unique partnership, that resulted in a sip of history in your glass, Fleur was only supposed to be brewed that one time, but it has proven so popular that it remains not just on the menu, but on a few taps in the area as well. 

So while Danny might claim that Biére de Mac is getting back to it’s original purpose of brewing great beer, I’m going to argue that they never left it. Maybe they took a short detour to dish up some pretty amazing food to go along with their brews and now have come up with a solution to offer both good nosh and great beers. No matter the season, a must-stop when traveling through the Straights.  

“We’re excited,” Danny said. “It realigns us back to what we wanted to do, what we are passionate about. Beer.”

Amy Sherman is a regular on the MiBrew Trail. She graduated from Aquinas College and promptly headed into the kitchen, where she was a working chef for over 20 years. Running her own business, Two Chicks and an Oven, she's worked the line, baked wedding cakes, catered, consulted, and taught cooking classes all over Michigan. She was the host of the television show Great American Brew Trail, as well as the co-host of the award-winning radio show Behind the Mitten. For the last five years, she's been a journalist at some big media company, eating and drinking her way across the state. She resides in Grand Rapids with her hubs, three perfectly awesome kids, and two crazy cute chihuahuas.