Blast Beats, Battle Jackets and Beer: Decibel’s 2026 Metal & Beer Fest, Sunday Night
This year’s two-day run unfolded May 2–3, 2026, at The Fillmore in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Night II — Sunday, May 3 — is the focus of this dispatch.
MAY 12, 2026 - By the Fermented Metal staff
Nick Stewart of Power Trip
A Festival Built on Distortion and Fermentation
When Decibel Magazine poured its first pint at the inaugural Metal & Beer Fest in April 2017, it bet on a simple hypothesis: the same crowd that obsesses over guitar tone obsesses over well crafted beer; especially with a metal label. Nine years later, that bet looks like a layup. The fest debuted at Philadelphia’s Fillmore on April 22–23, 2017, with Sleep, Pig Destroyer, Municipal Waste, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed sharing the bill — and breweries like Three Floyds and Unibroue sharing the floor. The marriage of underground extreme metal and serious craft-beer programming was novel at the time; today, it’s an annual rite for a particular kind of pilgrim who keeps a band labeled pint glass and a denim vest in the same closet.
The festival expanded to a Los Angeles weekend in 2018 and ’19 before settling into a steadier rhythm focused on Philadelphia, with a Denver edition added to the calendar. The 2026 Philly installment marked the ninth year of the flagship event, and for the first time in its history, the fest opened its doors as an all-ages show — a notable shift for a weekend whose name literally includes the word “Beer,” and one that suggests Decibel’s programmers want to push the next generation toward both the pit and the pour.
Night II: The Brewery Hall
Metal & Beer ticket holders received unlimited sampling pours across the run, with rare and high-ABV releases gated by limited “extreme pour” tickets — a system Decibel has used in recent years to keep keg-killer releases from disappearing in the first thirty minutes. New for 2026, Doom Bar — a metal-themed Philadelphia tavern — served as the festival’s official off-site home base, hosting pre-shows, after-hours hangs, and additional pours throughout the weekend. ( See Fermented Metal's Doom article).
The 2026 brewery roster, presented by 3 Floyds Brewing, totaled fourteen producers pouring more than 40 distinct beers and meads across the weekend. The full participating lineup, announced by Decibel on February 11, 2026, included the following:
3 Floyds Brewing — Munster, IN
3 Floyds is the brewery that more or less drew the blueprint for the metal-meets-beer-fest experiment, and its presenting-sponsor role at the 2026 fest is a victory lap as much as a booking. The company opened in 1996 and is best known for its barleywine Behemoth and the imperial stout Dark Lord, the latter of which spawned Dark Lord Day — initially just the one day a year you could buy the beer, eventually a destination metal festival in its own right. 3 Floyds’ first beer-with-a-band collaboration was The Creeper, a doppelbock brewed in 2010 to mark Chicago post-metal outfit Pelican’s tenth anniversary; the years since have brought beers tied to Mastodon, Skeletonwitch, Exodus, Cannibal Corpse, Amon Amarth, and Pig Destroyer.
Band Collab: Municipal Waste
Pre Game Pils
Pilsner
ABV: 5.2%
Sunday only pour
Dark Lord Munster Punch
Barrel-aged Imperial Stout
ABV: 15%
WarPigs Brewing — Munster, IN
WarPigs takes its name straight from Black Sabbath’s 1970 Paranoid opener, and the brand makes no bones about it: the original 2015 Copenhagen brewpub was billed as a Texas-barbecue-meets-beer-hall built around an “army theme” and a metal soundtrack. WarPigs launched as a transatlantic collaboration between Indiana’s 3 Floyds and Denmark’s Mikkeller; the partnership formally dissolved in November 2021, and WarPigs USA now operates independently out of the 3 Floyds campus in Munster, IN. The Indianapolis location referenced in early festival materials reflects the brand’s distribution reach rather than its brewing address.
Band Collab: Necrot
Drain the Skull
Kölsch-style ale
ABV: 5.2%
XUL Beer Company — Knoxville, TN
If there’s a brewery whose entire identity sits inside the festival’s center of gravity, it’s XUL. The name comes from a Sumerian adjective meaning both “great” and “evil” — a word that drifted into pop culture via Simon’s Necronomicon and the Diablo video-game series, and which the brewery uses with full black-metal swagger.
XUL was founded in Knoxville’s old Carmichael’s car showroom by Brad West, head brewer Bentley Blackshear, and Tara Thacker, who met at a beer fest in 2018 and were drafting brewery plans by 2019. Their core output is award-winning hazy IPAs, fruited sours, and pastry stouts; the branding leans corpse-paint and occult, with merch that would look at home at a Watain merch table.
Band Collab: Power Trip
Hornet's Nest
Pilsner
ABV: 4.4%
Standout offering
PB&J Mixtape
Fruited Sour
ABV: 6.5%
One guy told me, "It is tastes just like an Uncrustable!"
Magnanimous Brewing — Tampa, FL
Magnanimous opened its Tampa Heights flagship in October 2020 under co-founders Charlie Meers and Michael Lukacina, and built its reputation on a relentlessly experimental hazy-IPA program. Flagship Juice Lord — double-dry-hopped with Citra and Mosaic — has spun out into double, triple, and quad IPA variants, alongside a Czech-style lager called Zurg and a coffee-and-pumpkin-spice English porter called Solace. The brewery’s connection to metal is less aesthetic than chemical: heavy, intense, expressive beer that rewards the same kind of palate that listens to extreme music. Their festival appearance places them squarely in the camp of breweries that win over the riff-and-pour crowd through sheer technical ambition rather than thematic branding.
Band Collab: Fulci
Touch of Death
Italian Pilsner
ABV: 5.5%
New Trail Brewing Co. — Williamsport, PA
New Trail is the closest thing the Night Two floor has to a “lifestyle” brewery — its four founders are climbers, mountain bikers, hikers, and skiers, and the brand is wired to the I-80 Frontier of the Pennsylvania Wilds rather than to the basement-show circuit. Founded in 2018, the brewery built its profile on the hazy IPA Broken Heels, which has anchored their distribution into PA, NJ, MD, and DE. There’s no direct metal hook here; what New Trail brings to the Decibel floor is the kind of clean, high-quality hop-forward beer that resets the palate between rare stouts. Consider it the festival’s recovery lap between Cryptopsy and Power Trip.
Band Collab: Kylesa
Running Red
Amber Lager
ABV: 5%
Nepenthe Brewing Co. — Baltimore, MD
The name alone earns Nepenthe its slot on a festival floor that loves death-and-funeral nomenclature. In Homer’s Odyssey, nepenthe is the drug of forgetfulness Helen of Troy slips into the wine of Telemachus and Menelaus to quell their grief; Edgar Allan Poe later borrowed the word for “The Raven,” where the narrator longs for a draught to forget Lenore.
Brian Arnold, his wife Jill Antos, and business partner Brendan Kirlin converted a former sports bar and meatpacking plant in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood and opened the brewery in January 2019 — an 11,000-square-foot space that started life as a homebrew supply shop. The connection to extreme metal is literary rather than musical, but the lineage of grief, oblivion, and dark consolation runs straight through the discography of half the bands on the bill.
Outstanding offering
Alpacas Fracas
Double IPA
ABV: 8.1%
Little Cottage Brewery — Avondale Estates, GA
Little Cottage’s metal pedigree is the most explicit on this list outside of XUL. Owners Jon and Aimee Shari built the brand around what local press has called a “heavy metal vibe,” a deliberate counter-programming move against what Jon described as an Atlanta-area scene where breweries felt interchangeable. The operation started with a homebrew kit Aimee gave Jon in 2012, scaled across years of refining, and opened its Avondale Estates taproom in 2021 at 120 Olive Street .
Band Collab: Cryptopsy
Haze ov the Fathers
Triple IPA
ABV: 10.5% (Ticketed pour)
Necromantic Brew Co. — Farmingdale, NY
Necromantic is, on paper, a quietly remarkable brewery: the first fully gluten-free brewery and taproom in New York State, opened in March 2022 in Farmingdale on Long Island. The horror-movie aesthetic is baked into the brand from the name down through the taproom decor, with rotating beers that lean into the spooky vocabulary — stouts, pumpkin sours, pumpkin ales, and seasonal experiments. For the Decibel crowd, the appeal was double: a brewery that takes the death-and-corpse-paint side of metal seriously, plus the rare phenomenon of a fully celiac-safe pour station on a 14-brewery festival floor. The metal connection is thematic and unmistakable.
Outstanding offering
Show Me The Way To Gose Home
Lemon Gose
ABV: 5%
Ghost Hawk Brewing Company — Clifton, NJ
Ghost Hawk’s name is a memorial. Co-founder Steven Bauer’s younger brother Danny — who carried a large red-tailed hawk tattoo, a reference to the brothers’ childhood hiking and camping with their father — passed in 2016. After Danny’s death, Steve saw a red-tailed hawk circling over a childhood fishing spot and read it as a sign; he has continued to see the “ghost hawk” at significant moments since. The brewery opened on April 20, 2019, with Bauer, fellow Clifton native Thomas Rachelski, and head brewer Chris Sheehan — Passaic County’s first full-production brewery since Prohibition. Stylistically Ghost Hawk runs a broad, traditional book: lagers, IPAs, stouts, Belgians, saisons.
Sunday only pour
Cherry Daedalion
American Wheat
ABV: 4 %
Spring House Brewing Company — Lancaster, PA
Spring House opened in 2007 inside a 200-plus-year-old barn in Lancaster County and has been quietly stocking the festival floor with horror-leaning seasonals ever since. Flagship Big Gruesome is a peanut-butter-chocolate stout brewed with two malts and aged on cocoa nibs and whole vanilla beans, and the seasonal rotation reads like a B-movie marathon: Diabolical Doctor Wit, Two Front Teeth Holiday Ale, and the eggnog stout The Martians Kidnap Santa! The Hazel Street brewery now also runs a wood-fired pizza kitchen and an arcade, plus satellite taprooms (the Coffin Bar in downtown Lancaster, the Tavern in Strasburg). Spring House lands somewhere between Saturday-morning-creature-feature and proper extreme-metal cosplay, but the horror lineage tracks.
Imprint Beer Co. — Hatfield, PA
Imprint launched in 2018 in a Hatfield industrial park and has carved out a serious cult following on the strength of Schmoojee, a thick-bodied fruited sour conditioned with lactose that helped popularize the smoothie-sour format on the East Coast. The brewery’s beer-name vocabulary leans firmly horror-core — past pours have included names like Casket Full of Mosaic and Cryptic Touch, and the taproom houses an in-house arcade called the Gnarcadium. The metal connection runs through the naming convention and the aesthetic rather than any specific band collaboration, but Imprint’s customer base overlaps heavily with the Decibel reader profile — collectors who chase haze and rare sours with the same intensity others chase out-of-print Profound Lore vinyl.
Sunday only pour
Banana Thickr Than Snickr
Stout
ABV: 12% ( Ticketed pour)
Requiem Bier — Philadelphia, PA
Requiem Bier is a Philadelphia-based “nomadic” or contract brewery, meaning it develops its own recipes while brewing at partner facilities rather than operating a traditional fixed brewhouse; that lean model lets the brand focus heavily on beer identity, collaborations, and scene-driven releases. For the fest’s published beer menu, Requiem poured Hop Mincer, a 7% Belgian IPA made as a collaboration with Oakland mincecore band Haggus, and Dead Stroke, a 4.1% pub ale—a compact but very on-brand showing for a brewery whose name and aesthetic already sit comfortably in the death-and-doom end of the beer spectrum.
Band Collab: Haggus
Hop Mincer
Belgian Lager
ABV: 7%
Brimming Horn Meadery — Milton, DE
Brimming Horn was the lone dedicated meadery on the floor — and one of the most credentialed producers, full stop. Co-founder Jon Talkington started brewing at sixteen with a Finnish sima recipe pulled from a Scandinavian cookbook, and has since won two Mazer Cups, the international championship of mead. He runs Brimming Horn with Robert Walker; the Milton facility opened in 2017 and the Seaford location followed in 2024. The brand’s mythology is entirely Norse — most meads are named for gods, goddesses, and beings from Northern European mythology, and the meadery’s symbol is a horn overflowing with mead, the kind passed among kinsmen “to drink, toast, boast, oath, and bond.” For the Decibel crowd, Brimming Horn is the most direct line between extreme metal’s Scandinavian roots and the liquid in the glass; expect Amon Amarth fans to find it first. Their Mead and Metal collaboration series is extensive, including a collaboration with Soulfly's Max Cavalera .
Sunday-only pour
Mango Mead
Session / Carbonated Mead
ABV: 8%
Bear Cult Brewing Co. — Seaford, DE
Bear Cult is the festival’s clearest direct line to black-metal mythology. The nanobrewery is a sister project to Brimming Horn Meadery, founded by Jon Talkington and Robert “JR” Walker, and it leans hard into historical and Norse beer styles — stouts, lagers, braggots, graf. The Decibel-circulated Skull Fracturing Lager and Nattbjorn (Norwegian for “Night Bear,” a Norwegian-ale-yeast obsidian-hued ale) are the brand’s most recognizable pours. Critically for any reader of Decibel, Bear Cult hosts an annual 793 party — a commemoration of the Viking raid on the Lindisfarne monastery in 793 AD, the foundational event that black-metal pioneers Bathory, Enslaved, and a generation of Scandinavian extreme musicians built an entire mythology around.
Band Collab: Cro-Mags
Age of Pilsner
Czech Pilsnerr
ABV: 5.2%
Night II: On Stage
Sunday, May 3 was the heavier and arguably more anticipated half of the weekend, anchored by a long-rumored return and three high-watermark sets from the extreme-metal underground, and an unexpected addition. The full Night II band lineup in order of appearance:
Spirit Adrift are an American heavy metal/doom-rooted band led by guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Nate Garrett, originally launched in 2015 as Garrett’s solo vehicle before becoming one of the more respected traditional-metal-leaning acts of the last decade. Their 2026 album Infinite Illumination has been framed as the project’s final statement, with recent coverage noting Garrett’s decision to end Spirit Adrift while still at a creative high point. Their sound bridges classic doom, traditional heavy metal, NWOBHM energy, Southern grit, and big melodic songwriting—think Sabbath weight filtered through Maiden/Priest ambition and a very personal sense of struggle and uplift. They were a last minute replacement for Fulci - The Italian death-metal outfit named after horror auteur Lucio Fulci, who could had last minute Visa issues and had to cancel.
A relatively new presence in the death-metal touring ecosystem and the opening act for the Decibel Magazine Tour 2026 package that fed into the festival. A Washington, D.C.-based death metal/deathgrind band formed in 2023 by guitarist/vocalist Shelby Lermo of Ulthar and ex-Vastum, with guitarist Tommy Wall of Undeath, bassist Nolan of Genocide Pact/Shitstorm, and drummer Nadia Tydings-Lynch of Goetia/Deliriant Nerve rounding out the lineup; their debut album, The Calling of Fire, was released in May 2025 through Profound Lore and was described by Decibel as a 27-minute first statement that put the band “on the map for any death metal fan.”
Necrot are an Oakland, California death metal trio formed in 2011, built around Luca Indrio on vocals/bass, Chad Gailey on drums, and Sonny Reinhardt on guitar; their official Bandcamp describes them simply as “Oakland Death Metal since 2011,” while Metal Blade’s 2026 signing announcement notes the members’ ties to Bay Area acts including Acephalix, Vastum, and Saviours. The band’s most recent full-length, Lifeless Birth, was released in April 2024 via Tankcrimes, following Blood Offerings and Mortal, and it helped keep Necrot positioned as one of the stronger contemporary American old-school death metal bands.
The beer side of their appearance was unusually direct, as WarPigs Brewing poured “Drain the Skull,” a Necrot collaboration billed as a 5.2% Kölsch-style ale. Their own social post from the event day stated they were playing at 8:10 p.m. and urged fans to drink “Drain the Skull” at the WarPigs table.
Cryptopsy are a Montreal technical/brutal death metal institution, with the current lineup of Flo Mounier on drums, Matt McGachy on vocals, Christian Donaldson on guitar, and Oli Pinard on bass; their 1996 album None So Vile remains the band’s defining classic, while 2025’s An Insatiable Violence showed the modern lineup still pushing the band’s violent, hyper-technical sound forward.
They performed the full set of None So Vile, the 1996 Canadian technical-death-metal landmark, to mark the album’s 30th anniversary. None So Vile is one of the most cited records in extreme metal, and the album-in-full performance was the night’s marquee draw for the tech-death faithful. They also played material from An Insatiable Violence; vocalist Matt McGachy called it a chance to honor the classic album while presenting “the new era of Cryptopsy.” It was Cryptopsy’s first time performing at Decibel Metal & Beer Fest.
Power Trip are a Dallas, Texas crossover-thrash band formed in 2008, best known for fusing hardcore’s physicality with classic thrash riffing on records such as Manifest Decimation and the widely acclaimed Nightmare Logic. After the 2020 death of original vocalist Riley Gale, the band returned with Seth Gilmore on vocals, joining Blake Ibanez, Nick Stewart, Chris Whetzel, and Chris Ulsh in the current live lineup.
At Decibel Magazine Metal & Beer Fest: Philly 2026, Power Trip headlined the Sunday, May 3 night at The Fillmore Philadelphia; Decibel billed the appearance as the band’s first Philadelphia performance in seven years. The fan-maintained setlist record documents a career-spanning performance that included “Soul Sacrifice,” “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe),” “Firing Squad,” “Hornet’s Nest,” “Nightmare Logic,” “Manifest Decimation,” and “Crossbreaker.” Their beer-fest presence also had a direct fermentation tie-in: XUL Beer Company’s official fest menu included “Hornet’s Nest,” a Power Trip pilsner made for the event. When we asked Xul what was Power Trip's input on what type of beer to make, it basically came down to "nothing complex". It stands to reason that after a good thrashing, they just want to relax with something easy....