Barflies buzzing for some weird beers have less than a week to check out a pickle-flavoured pilsner at a St. Albert brewery.
St. Albert’s Endeavour Brewery & Coffee Roasters is serving up a special beer called All Hail the Dilsner this month as part of the 2025 Wyrd Bier festival. The event, now in its third year, sees Edmonton-area breweries draw customers by creating bizarre limited edition beers.
The festival started out as a capstone event for the newly formed Northern Alberta Brewers Alliance, said organizer Bryan Launier, owner of Analog Brewing Company in Edmonton.
“It’s a chance for us to experiment and for customers to get around and try all the creativity breweries can have.”
This year’s event started on Jan. 8 and has been dubbed “Wyrdstock” in reference to the groovy Woodstock music festival. Participants can visit 19 Edmonton-area breweries and sample the strange brews they prepared for this year’s festivities, some of which can be bought in cans from North Central Co-Op outlets. Guests can get a stamp on a passport at each brewery, and earlier on in the festival could turn in completed passports for limited edition Wyrd Bier Chalices (a custom beer glass) and Medals of Absolute Coolness.
Launier said the festival was so popular that all 500 chalices were snapped up in the first week, with the 100 medals nabbed within 95 minutes of their release on Jan. 17.
“We had a line up out the doors,” he recalled.
“It was around our building. It was insane.”
While the medals and chalices were gone, Launier said participants can still use their tickets to enter a prize draw and claim a beer glass from last year’s festival.
Very weird
Endeavour Brewery created a green onion cake beer for last year’s festival, said co-owner Matthew Atkins. This year’s Dilsner was a cross between a Caesar cocktail and a pickle, and combines pilsner, Worcestershire sauce, Clamato, tabasco sauce, dill pickle brine, and an actual dill pickle.
“It’s a spicy dill pickle pilsner,” Atkins said.
“It’s definitely weird, and people have been buying it.”
Atkins said the lower hops content of the pilsner made it easier to combine with other flavours, while its bready, spicy taste matched well with the Caesar. He recommended pairing the drink with a Caesar meat stick; many of his customers brought their own. He prepared 500 L of the drink for this year's event, and would probably never make it again.
Launier said his brewery served up a pizza-sauce beer earlier in the festival, and now has a pineapple pizza India pale gruit (a beer made with herbs instead of hops) on tap. Other breweries are serving up drinks called Unicorn Blood (a shimmering purple ale with optional boba bubbles), Doughnut Party (a raspberry Bismarck pastry sour), and Death Row Meal Shrimp Cocktail.
One beer on the this year’s menu that’s bizarre from a brewer’s perspective is Bent Stick Brewing’s mashed potato lager, Launier said.
“About 50 per cent of the fermentable sugar in the beer didn’t come from malt. It came from potato starch, and the beer still tastes like a beer.”
Launier said the Wyrd Bier festival gives customers get to explore the region, meet new friends, and support local farms and businesses. The festival also draws new customers to brewers during what is usually a dull, cold time of year.
The Wyrd Bier festival wraps up Feb. 16. Visit wyrdbier.ca for details.
