Nocturnal Bloom Is Blooming

Sharing a beer with brewer and owner Justin Rivard

By Karl Klockars | Dec. 20, 2025

What do you do as a brewer when you’ve made beer all over Michigan, taken your brewery skills to California, earned an Advanced Cicerone certification (one of just 200 in the world), consulted on new breweries, trained brewers to open places of their own, and studied your craft under brewing legends like Jolly Pumpkin’s Ron Jeffries?

If you’re Justin Rivard, you come home.

That’s how Traverse City happened to end up with the new Nocturnal Bloom Brewery in the Atomic Marketplace, which opened in early August. Well, that, and a little nudge from West Coast real estate prices and accessibility for folks in the hospitality industry.

“My wife and I wanted to own a house, we wanted to be closer to family and our support network, and it was one of those moments where I wasn’t sure if I should change careers, or if I just needed to commit and go all in. So I moved back here,” Rivard says. “All the pieces fell together.”

One of those big pieces was the Atomic Marketplace: the dramatically airy, minimalist, Japandi-styled open-interior space for vendors including a coffee shop (Seismoto), a kitchen (Acorns), and a brewery. Rivard’s family knew the builder, Bryan Roth, who was interested in housing a brewery at the new project.

“I was like, well, I’ve been doing this for about 15 years, and this is what I’m looking to do in Traverse City…” And that piece fell in place. “His attention to detail and his vision really captivated me,” Rivard says.

Beer + Botanicals 

Prior to Nocturnal Bloom, Rivard started his beermaking career at the Jolly Pumpkin on Old Mission Peninsula, which led to jobs in southeast Michigan at the North Peak production brewery as well as at Ann Arbor’s Grizzly Peak, and then to head brewer at Arbor Brewing and at a brewpub in central California. All of that experience adds up to a wide breadth of beer experience, as evidenced by his current lineup of beers.

Rivard’s beer styles run the gamut from West Coast IPA to English styles to barrel-aged sours, but as a conservationist-minded individual, many of the beers at NB are made with 100 percent Michigan ingredients.

“Short of the yeast—there’s no Michigan yeast company—[it’s] all Michigan grains, all Michigan hops. I want to play in that realm of spices and botanicals, but still clean drinkability. That’s really important,” he says.

Also, as you may have gleaned from the floral name of the brewery, “there’s a botanical edge that I’d like to develop,” Rivard adds. “Working with hyper local ingredients and foraging, to some extent.”

You can see the start of that botanical edge in beers like the black walnut brown ale, the pear-infused Belgian ale, and their popular jasmine rice lager.

“I look at brewing as a culinary practice, without getting too out there,” Rivard says. “Things like a hazy milkshake sour IPA … okay, you just named three separate beers that could all be great, and if you combine all of those together, you end up with one beer that’s … not so great.”

Wine + Spirits

Nocturnal Bloom is more than a brewery, though—it’s actually licensed as a winery, brewery, and a distillery, which means that Rivard can make and ferment pretty much anything his heart desires. And after a decade and a half of making beer, getting to stretch his legs into these newer areas is fun.

“It’s definitely refreshing,” Rivard says. “We make our own orange liqueur in house, and it’s awesome. We’re making our own amaro ... the hope is that eventually I’ll be doing some other interesting things with those licenses.”

Part of these other beverages is creativity; the other in necessity.

“The industry is changing, and not everyone drinks beer,” Justin says. “The good news is that the people are excited about the beer, but we’re an inclusive industry. Someone comes in, they only drink cocktails, cider, or wine—I wanted to make sure there was a blending of all that stuff.”

That blending is also literal. For example, the black walnut syrup that goes into their Old Fashioned is a reduced-down version of their black walnut brown ale; the puree that flavors their watermelon gose also goes into their margarita; their Ninja Naranja cocktail gets jasmine rice lager floated on top.

“I’m not looking to ostracise people,” Rivard says. “Good brewery owners know that first and foremost, we’re in the hospitality industry.”

Affordability + Simplicity

And opportunities for hospitality abound at the Atomic Market. In addition to the sprawling patio and bocce field, there’s a side patio that’s currently mostly a cornhole area, but hopefully could be an event space. For the brewery, beer dinners with seasonal pairings are on the to-do list. Live music. Beer trivia. More wine. More cider. Plenty of beer.

And importantly for many, affordable beer is on the menu.

“It’s hard, but I do have two $6 beers available,” Rivard says. “Because it’s tough out there. Beer is historically a working person’s beverage. Having some of those really affordable beers is important to me.”

A couple of affordable beers often leads to exploring the more creative side of the beer board, and another piece helping Nocturnal Bloom fall into place is the Michigan beer drinker that’s open to all these things.

“I think a lot of people have gone full circle. They’ve had the cotton candy double IPA with sprinkles, pixie dust, and whatever. And they’re ready for creative stuff, but there’s a point where you’re just making it too busy,” Rivard says. “In California, you walk into a brewery and it’s like, 17 hazy IPAs and then a token pilsner. I think beers are kind of like moods. Sometimes I’m like, ‘man, I just want beer flavored beer.’

Many drinkers probably recognize that Traverse City (or the American craft beer scene writ large) hasn’t been much of a beer-flavored-beer kind of city over the past couple of decades. But maybe there’s a place here for someone who makes cream ales, pale ales, and rice lagers. Maybe it’s blooming right now.

The Uppers to NB’s Downers: Seismoto Coffee

Arrive before the Nocturnal Bloom bar opens for business and you’ll likely find yourself gravitating towards the other beverage maker at the Atomic Market: Seismoto Coffee. Opened a few months before Nocturnal Bloom, Seismoto primarily works with local roaster Panther Coffee and features other roasters on a rotating basis, along with teas from Onyx Tea.

That Panther espresso makes its way into drinks like a S’more Latte, while ground green tea provides the base for their Banana Bread Matcha Latte, with bananas, cinnamon, and vanilla. The combination of coffee in the AM and beer in the early afternoon (plus some nice looking cinnamon rolls from Simply Sourdough) makes for an all-day array of patrons working remotely, taking meetings and hanging out in the airy, open space.

The Sara Lee Situation

One of the year’s stinkiest stories was the Sara Lee Odor Issue. In August, an issue with the frozen bakery’s on-site wastewater pre-treatment facility caused some extremely noxious odors, affecting their neighbors at the Atomic Market. “I assumed originally that it was the water treatment plant,” Rivard says, describing the smell as a brewer trained in off-flavors would: “It was a sewer-y smell … honestly, it smelled like really sulfury, stressed out yeast.”

Whatever it was, it wasn’t great for business. “It was really the worst for the beer garden, because we had a number of days that were super beautiful, and we had to shut the doors.”

Definitely not what you want when you’re in your very first days of selling a beverage whose aroma is a major part of the drinking experience, but to Sara Lee’s credit, Rivard says that the situation has been solved and they don’t expect any future issues. “The plant manager actually stopped in here, dropped off a business card, and had a beer. He reached out to me, and within that week it was resolved.”

Photo by Hallie Kohler