Collect spent six years on the second floor of a Gratiot building in Eastern Market, above what used to be Gather. In June 2024 the lease ran out. In August they moved a mile and change east to 9301 Kercheval, in the West Village, into a 3,500-square-foot space inside a building owned by Library Street Collective.
The new spot has a courtyard, a basketball hoop, and a regulation-height ceiling. The Eastern Market spot did not. The license cleared at 4 p.m. on Friday, August 16.
Co-owner Kyle Hunt told the local TV crews the doors opened ten minutes later. There were regulars. There were also new faces from a neighborhood Collect had not been a neighborhood bar in before.
Kyle and Lea Hunt, married, met in high school and started Collect in 2018. They also own Two Birds and Huddle Soft Serve, plus a custard pop-up called Easy Peasy that opened earlier the same summer. Collect is the bar piece of an empire that runs almost entirely on beer and ice cream.
The new menu has seven beers on tap, a rotating cooler of unique cans from across the country, hot dogs, and Gatorade Frost on draft. The shot-and-a-beer is six dollars. So is the Gatorade.
The basketball hoop is the new room's signature move. Hunt told Detroit-area press that the ceilings were tall enough to hang a regulation rim, and they had the room, so why not. There is no NCAA bracket on the wall.
There is, by all accounts, a steady stream of patrons who shoot one before ordering. The Eastern Market space stayed dark for a few months before Nelson Kazan took it over and opened Pocket Change in April 2025. That story is its own story.
For Collect, the West Village move was a graduation. The mom-and-pop scaffolding that built the original space was no longer enough to hold the demand the second floor created. Two parking lots.
A patio with shade. A neighborhood that didn't have a beer bar before. Library Street Collective rented the building, and the Hunts opened the doors. 9301 Kercheval, Suite 4, West Village.
Open seven days. Pours start at 4 p.m. weekdays, noon weekends.
