Eight Weird and Wacky Beers at This Year’s Collaboration Festival

Hosted by the Colorado Brewers Guild, Collaboration Fest is one of Colorado’s most popular beer festivals. It’s also home to some of the wackiest beers ever made. According to Propagate’s Charles McManus, one of the best parts of the fest is that half the entries are usually “weird” or trying something that’s never been attempted before.

Special batch collaborations between two breweries that excel at specific styles are frequent fest highlights. At the 2025 Collaboration Fest, set for April 19, those include beers such as Alpha Blaster, a West Coast IPA from two of the best at the style: 2023 Brewery of the Year Cannonball Creek Brewing and California’s Shred Beer.

Some breweries combine well-known brands to create fun combinations, such as TmavYeti, a blend of Wild Provisions’ Tmave dark lager and Great Divide Brewing’s Yeti stout. Odyssey Beerwerks and River North Brewery teamed up for Fluffy Nightmare – a combination of Odyssey’s marshmallow-laden “fluffy” series and River North’s coffee “Nightmare Fuel” beers.

There are also historical beers, such as the two steinbiers available this year. Steinbiers are made by heating rocks up to very high temperatures to help boil the beer, which imparts rich, melanoidin flavors into the final product. Two22 Brew and A Bit Twisted Brewpub teamed up for an aspen-aged version of this style, while Wibby Brewing and Seattle’s Seapine Brewing heated up chunks of granitic stones to 600+ degrees to make a pale bock.

Whether you’re at the festival to drink IPAs, classic lagers, big beers or sours, make sure to try a few of the crazy concoctions available. Here are eight of the wild and wackiest beers at this year’s fest:

Bad Ass
Smoked Pulled Pork Stout
A Bit Twisted Brewpub and Monolith Brewing
This doozy comesfrom the folks who put brisket into a beer for last year’s Collaboration Fest. The pair brewed a stout with Troubadour Malt’s custom-smoked peach wood malt, then put four pork butts, totaling 50 pounds, into the whirlpool of the beer. “It tastes just like the crispy skin on a smoked pig,” says Monolith owner and head brewer Stephen Monahan.

Stihl Crazy (after all these years)
Norwegian Farmhouse Ale with Ponderosa Pine Tree
Woods Boss Brewing with Silver Moon Brewing
This farmhouse ale was made with a blend of saison and kveik yeast. Hot wort was cycled through a luge made from a fresh-cut ponderosa, extracting character from the tree.

Purple People Eater
Grape Soda Sour Ale
105 West Brewing and Something Brewery
This grape soda sour was made using Concord grape powder.

Biscuit Topper
Hot Honey Wheat Ale
6 & 40 Brewing, LUKI Brewery and Lariat Lodge Brewing
The three breweries share connections as previous colleagues and customers of each other. They combined forces to create a beer that they’d like to pour at a family-style dinner.

Red Tepache Sour
Sour Ale
Cheluna Brewing and Oaxaca Brewing
This sour ale uses cochineal, a natural red dye made from crushing the bodies of the cochineal insect, a traditional ingredient used in Oaxaca. It was combined with tepache, a pineapple-laden drink, to create an interesting sour ale.

Uncommon Link
Raspberry Jalapeno Popper Ale
Coal Mine Ave Brewing, Wild Sky Brewery and Chain Reaction Brewing
In what sounds more like a wild chip flavor that you’d find at a 7/Eleven, three Denver metro-breweries teamed up to create this spicy, fruity beer.

Smooth Crimini-Ale
Mushroom West Coast Pilsner
Old 121 Brewhouse and Lady Justice Brewing
Mushroom beers were all the rage at the 2023 Collaboration Festival (there were three mushroom beers that year!). This year’s lone mushroom beer uses both cremini and porcini mushrooms, balanced by dank, piney and citrus hop flavors. Mushrooms are notoriously subtle in beer, but porcini pack a bit more of a pungent umami flavor, so it’ll be interesting to see how a hoppy style plays with those flavors.

goldEnschlager Cinnamon Lager
Herb and Spice Pilsner with Gold Flakes
Propagate Lab, Cannonball Creek Brewing, Mountain Toad Brewing, Mad Macks Brewing, Over Yonder Brewing and Barrels & Bottles Brewery
These golden breweries, along with yeast lab Propagate, came together in 2020 to make a Belgian golden ale. Thanks to COVID, though, the festival did not happen that year. Five years later, Propagate founder Matthew Peetz wanted to get the group back together for a collaboration beer, and a Goldschlager-inspired beer won out. The base beer is a Mexican lager, with cinnamon added as a tincture made from soaking cinnamon sticks in Goldschlager, the Swiss cinnamon schnapps liqueur.  “I haven’t seen many cinnamon beers there before,” says Propogate’s McManus. “And I certainly haven’t seen gold flakes used in any beer, so [this] is definitely a great setting to show off this one-of-a-kind beer.”

Collaboration Fest runs from 3 to 6 p.m. on Saturday, April 19, at the Westin Westminster, 10600 Westminster Boulevard. For tickets and more details (early-entry tickets get you in at 2 p.m.), visit collaborationbeerfest.com.