Leavenworth Festbier Is All Three of the Town's Breweries

Leavenworth has three breweries, and all three of them brewed this one. Icicle, Blewett and Doghaus built a golden lager on nothing but German malt and German hops, and put the town's name on the can instead of their own.

Style: Festbier
Release Date: 2026-09-02
ABV: N/A
Icicle Brewing Company (Leavenworth, WA)

Leavenworth, Washington has three breweries. All three of them made this beer.

Leavenworth Festbier is a collaboration between Icicle Brewing Company, Blewett Brewing and Doghaus Brewery, the full brewing population of a small town in the Cascades. Icicle describes it as a golden lager, light-bodied, toasty and biscuity, with a smooth malt backbone and what the brewery calls a kiss of bitterness. It is built with 100 percent German malts and hops.

That last detail is the constraint the rest of the beer hangs on. A festbier has no fruit addition, no adjunct and no aggressive hop character to hide behind, so the recipe comes down to base malt and the restrained, herbal bitterness of German noble varieties. Committing to German ingredients across the board is a deliberate narrowing of the options rather than a flourish.

The town gives the collaboration an obvious logic. Leavenworth rebuilt itself as a Bavarian village in the 1960s and has run the theme ever since, right down to an Oktoberfest celebration of its own. A joint festbier is close to civic infrastructure.

The can leans into it too. It carries the blue and white Bavarian lozenge pattern, a heraldic crest flanked by two gold lions, and an illustrated view down the valley toward the town.

Leavenworth Festbier is available now on draft and in six-packs of 12-ounce cans across Washington. It will also be pouring at Fremont Oktoberfest in Seattle from September 18 to 20, alongside Icicle's Alpenhaze Hazy IPA, and at Oktoberfest in Leavenworth itself.

Editor’s Take

Three breweries in one small town is normally the opening line of a story about market share. Instead the three of them have gone in together on a single lager, put the town's name on the can rather than any of their own, and sent it out across the state. I would like very much to see this attempted in a city. I suspect it would require eighteen months, a shared document nobody reads, and eventually a mediator.\n\nThe reason it works here is that a festbier gives three brewers almost nothing to argue about. All German malt, all German hops, no fruit puree, no adjunct, no hop named like a sports drink. Pale malt does the work and a modest noble bitterness stops the whole thing turning into bread. That is a harder consensus to reach than it sounds, because there is nowhere to hide in it. On a hazy IPA you can always keep everyone happy by adding one more hop. On this, somebody has to be right about the malt.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.