Christmas Tree Bonfires Are Coming to a Brewery Near You

During the holiday season, Indian Ladder Farms Cidery & Brewery in Altamont, N.Y., sells locally grown Christmas trees with a rather unique return policy.

On New Year’s Eve, customers can bring back used trees, stripped of tinsel, lights and ornaments, and receive an Indian Ladder beer or cider in return. The tree is then toted to Indian Ladder’s parking lot and placed near a homemade burn pit, some seven feet across and built from an old fermenter’s base.

Dietrich Gehring, a co-owner, will steadily fling evergreens into a growing inferno, one after another, crackling wood and delighted screams soundtracking the year’s last dark December night.

“It’s pretty spectacular when someone brings a big dry tree and we have a really hot fire,” Gehring says. He’ll feed trees into the fire until his arms grow sore. And they will. “Last year we did 254 trees,” he says, with a limit of two trees and two free drinks. “People were driving around local suburban cul-de-sacs and picking up, like, 10 trees in their pickup truck.”

As the holiday season’s boozy marathon comes to an eggnog-fueled conclusion, convincing people to leave comfy couches and visit a brewery or cidery can be difficult. Social batteries are depleted, livers are tired of working overtime, and it sure is shivering outside. To drum up business during late December and January, breweries are encouraging customers to bring their Christmas trees on site and set them ablaze, turning a chore into a chance to kindle kinship.

“It’s interpersonal and introspective,” says Curt Van Asten, the general manager of Schell’s Brewery in New Ulm, Minn., which hosted its inaugural Yule Light Up the Night Christmas tree bonfire in January 2024. When Schell’s tossed a big tree on the bonfire, the lively crowd would go crazy before the noise “drowned into nothing,” Van Asten says. “You only hear music and the tree burning, and there’s 90 people around there just staring at flames.”

Bonfires Bring People Together During Winter

Events have become integral to a brewery’s success, be it a weekly trivia night or a skee-ball league. “You always need to have something going on,” says Kyle Bergen, a co-founder and the head of business operations at Wayward Lane Brewing in Schoharie, N.Y.

Throughout the year, Wayward Lane packs its event calendar with tricycle races, pottery classes, bands, pumpkin chucking, and mommy-and-me yoga. “We are very much a family friendly brewery, and we see many more families in the summertime,” Bergen says. Family visits dwindle come winter when it’s often too cold to romp around the 65-acre rural brewery’s fields.

Several years ago, a local musician suggested that Wayward Lane host a Christmas tree burn. The band would play beforehand, too. “People around Schoharie love anything fire-related,” Bergen says. The first burn, in 2023, was a success, leading to a second pyre last year that was fueled by more than 70 trees.

“Lots of families and their kids come out,” Bergen says. “It’s cool to see some old faces that we usually see in the summertime.” (Wayward Lane’s third annual Christmas tree blaze will take place Jan. 6, featuring live music and, fittingly, a smoked robust porter served on cask.)

“Because the bonfire gets so big, it became a training opportunity for firefighters to learn how to put out big fires.”

Safely burning trees requires space, something not available to most urban breweries. “Would we be burning Christmas trees in the parking spaces right in front of the pub?” says Todd Boera, the creative director and a co-founder of Fonta Flora Brewery, which opened in downtown Morganton, N.C., in 2013.

Five years later, when Fonta Flora opened a second location in Nebo, N.C., on nine acres formerly home to a pastoral dairy farm, burning became more feasible. The brewery eventually started making steinbiers with fire-heated stone and, inspired by Zillicoah Beer Company’s own Christmas tree burn, began hosting its own B.Y.O.T. bonfire — that is, bring your own tree.

An upcoming burn, on Jan. 12, will double as a benefit for Zillicoah, which was devastated during Hurricane Helene. Fonta Flora will serve its Steinbock, a steinbier collaboration with Zillicoah, and Double Pine Zips, a stronger version of its resinous IPA flavored with eastern white pine needles. “People are drawn to any opportunity to be around fire,” Boera says.

Schell’s Brewery has refined the art of bringing people together over roaring fires. The brewery began hosting its late-winter Bockfest in 1987, and now anywhere from 5,500 to 6,500 people brave the elements to drink strong lagers that can be caramelized, on the spot, with red-hot pokers warmed in one of the brewery’s four fires.

To drum up business in late December and January, breweries are encouraging customers to bring in Christmas trees for an on-site bonfire.
Credit: Diversion Brewing via Instagram

“We have guard rails set up to make sure that people don’t get too close,” Van Asten says. The Christmas tree burn, which takes place Jan. 11, “is just another fun edition” in the brewery’s history of burning things.

Breweries Must Battle the Elements

Serving beer when it’s below freezing requires extra forethought. Schell’s keeps it simple by serving its lagers by the can, no need to mess with too-cold kegs. At the annual Old Newbury Christmas Tree Bonfire in Newbury, Mass., Ipswich Ale Brewery typically serves beer from its mobile tapmobile. Prior to the event, the brewery, based nearby in Ipswich, Mass., packs its tap lines with ethanol to prevent freezing.

“We used to joke about how it was a kind of a community service because people could see the danger of not watering their tree. Some trees are slow to go up, but others obviously haven’t been watered and are just torches. Like, ‘Oh my god, that could have been your house.’”

But a few years ago, the weather was so cold that Ipswich was unable to serve beer. “It was freezing in the nozzle in the faucet,” says James Dorau, the brewery’s operations manager. Other years, the grounds were so muddy that vendors got stuck near the entrance. “It’s like, ‘OK, this is where we’re selling,’” Dorau says.

Since 2011, the burn has taken place at Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, a National Historic Landmark, attracting more than 1,000 people to the festivities. “Because the bonfire gets so big, it became a training opportunity for firefighters to learn how to put out big fires,” says Sarah Blackstone, the marketing and events manager for Ipswich.

While the Old Newbury burn goes on with inclement weather, the 2025 bonfire was canceled due to ongoing drought conditions in the Northeast. Burning Christmas trees to start a forest fire might place someone on the permanent naughty list.

To drum up business in late December and January, breweries are encouraging customers to bring in Christmas trees for an on-site bonfire.
Credit: Indian Ladder Farms

A Christmas tree bonfire creates a dramatic conflagration precisely because of a dry tree’s combustibility. “We used to joke about how it was a kind of a community service because people could see the danger of not watering their tree,” Gehring says. “Some trees are slow to go up, but others obviously haven’t been watered and are just torches. Like, ‘Oh my god, that could have been your house,’” Gehring says. (This year’s burn served as a fundraiser for the local volunteer fire department, which was on hand for the event.)

The holiday season peters out in the New Year with fistfuls of Ibuprofen and half-hearted resolutions to give up this, lose that, become a better something. It’s all rather anticlimactic after all that fun. Better still is to end the holiday season, trees blazing, with friends new and old.

On Jan. 4, Great Sacandaga Brewing in Broadalbin, N.Y., will host its third annual Christmas tree burn. Erik Stevens, the founder and owner, is preparing to serve a barrel-aged version of the brewery’s Ring of Fire smoked ale, and guests will also receive one drink token for every tree.

There’s no limit (yet), and one year a few guys drove through town in their pickup truck, loading it with trees found on the side of the road. They then channeled their inner Santa.

“They got 10 drink tokens and passed them around like they’re passing out presents,” Stevens says. As for this year, “hopefully we’ll have some gentle snow falling, and it’ll be a good day for a fire.”

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